Photo via Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA
There was a period — roughly 1985 to 1995 — when wearing a Cure t-shirt was not a neutral act. It was a declaration. You were identifying yourself as someone who found beauty in sadness, who owned eyeliner, who had opinions about the difference between Pornography and Disintegration that you would share whether or not anyone asked. A Cure shirt was a membership card for a subculture that didn't have meetings but absolutely had a dress code.
Robert Smith made this possible by being, simultaneously, one of the most commercially successful and most genuinely strange figures in popular music. The Cure sold millions of records. They headlined festivals. "Friday I'm In Love" was a pop song that got played at weddings. And Smith — the smeared lipstick, the bird's-nest hair, the cardigans — looked like he'd wandered out of a Tim Burton film that hadn't been made yet. He made sadness look good, which is different from making it look romantic. It just looked like the truth, styled interestingly.
The Cure's merch from the late 80s and early 90s reflects this duality. The shirts are dark but not aggressive. The graphics are moody but not threatening. You could wear a Cure shirt to school without getting sent home, but everyone who saw it would know exactly what kind of music you listened to, what kind of poetry you read, and approximately how many candles you owned.
Today a Cure shirt means less and more. Less because you can buy one at any fast-fashion retailer and it might just mean you think Robert Smith's hair is funny. More because the band is still touring, Smith is still performing with the same intensity at 65 that he had at 25, and the 2022 album Songs of a Lost World proved that the thing was never a pose — he actually feels this way. He's been feeling this way for forty years.
This one is vintage. Not a reissue, not a reproduction. From the era when wearing it was a choice that cost you something socially and gained you something emotionally. There's one.
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Header image: Photo: Fay2, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons