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THE WEBSITE GRAILED isthe streetwear world's go-to place to find rare, coveted items of clothing being resold by fashion aficionados, often at grand markups from the retail price. A 2017 Louis Vuitton backpack made in collaboration with Supreme will set you back $35,000. An Off-White x Burton x Vogue snowboard? It's just over $18,000 as of press. Chrome Hearts own heart rings: Activate the platinum card. Lately, right alongside all the covetable totems of drop culture, a burgeoning swath of the resale site has been catering to a strange variant of hypebeast lust: promotional merch for films produced or distributed by A24, the boutique movie studio started by three Hollywood execs in 2012 that engendered the kind of cult appeal once reserved for skate brands and certain punk bands. Many of the shirts with imagery from A24 movies were likely produced for the cost of a decent tee, ink, and maybe some garment dye, but they can sell on Grailed for more than $200; hoodies can fetch $500.

"It all came together and now A24 has a streetwear brand," said Lawrence Schlossman, a former Grailed brand director who now cohosts the hit menswear podcast Throwing Fits. He mentioned offhand that, even with his collection of designer grails, he owns an A24 shirt and wears it "with pride."

That A24 has recently had a handful of movies garner lots of buzz—including Mike Mills's C'mon C'mon and Sean Baker's Red Rocket, which stars former MTV VJ Simon Rex in a breakout role—might have something to do with the brand's cultural appeal. But there's more to it than that. So since when did movie studios start clout chasing? Just a few years ago, even the idea that anyone would care about the people who put out movies was enough for Robert Pattinson to express disbelief that he was being contacted for a story. "It's crazy that there is an article about a distribution company," Pattinson told GQ,."That's completely nuts." (For the record, A24 expanded into production in 2015. Its principals declined to be interviewed for this story.)

But as far as indie film companies go, none in recent history has A24's manic track record. After its first theatrical release of the now forgotten Roman Coppola project starring Charlie Sheen, the company kicked off a yearslong hot streak with zeitgeist-capturing flicks like Spring Breakers and The Bling Ring. Its 2016 film Moonlight won the Oscar for best picture. A24 also lit up the box office with buzzy, not-dumb horror hits like Hereditary and Midsommar.

And it's used said buzz to sell T-shirts that fashion geeks fight over, proving we now live in a world where skate fans and sneakerheads are trading grails made by movie-biz suits to promote an art house movie. It used to be that merchandise was simply what a band signed to an independent label like Merge sold at a folding table by the stage after the show alongside stickers and CDs. Skate brands made T-shirts so their skaters could rep the logo not just under the deck but across the chest. The merch wave has of course been cresting for some time—arguably since the mid-2010s, when all the off-duty models at Paris Fashion Week rocked T-shirts promoting the skate magazine Thrasher and Kanye West sold $90 hoodies celebrating a one-off The Life of Pablo listening party at Madison Square Garden, despite estimates that some of his sweatshirts cost barely $20 to make. (They can now sell for double on Grailed.)

The emergence of quotidian apparel as a high-fashion object had a whiff of conceptual art project, a Duchampian attitude in which a urinal could be transubstantiated into museum-worthy sculpture just because the artist said so. Clearly a studio curating nearly 150 items on a dedicated shop page on its website wants fans of its movies to lust over the A24 dog leashes and A24 beach towels.

But what it might not have expected was the idea of an A24 fandom becoming one's entire ethos. Coastal elites who think lit-mag tote bags are basic started 'gramming themselves in A24 snapbacks and sweatshirts with the earnestness of a Knicks fan wearing blue and orange to the Garden. On Twitter, lonelyhearts joke that they might have to start using "A24" to describe their personality on dating apps. Naturally, the celebrities have gotten wind of the mania. In September 2020, Emma Stone was spotted wearing a white hat emblazoned with the studio's logo, and in February 2021, Hunter Schafer, star of the A24-produced Euphoria, braved the snow in Manhattan with a burnt orange version.

The key to A24's merch supremacy may lie in its collaboration savvy; from the get-go, it has enlisted taste-making streetwear and apparel heads to lend a hand in terms of design and, well, clout.

"Any graphics-driven streetwear studio would relish the opportunity to collab with A24," Schlossman said. "It can platform a collaborator. To some extent, they have the pick of the litter."

Elijah Funk, one half of the duo behind hippie streetwear titans Online Ceramics, which has made apparel based on A24 films including Saint Maud, The Lighthouse, and Midsommar, explained that he felt the same when I spoke to him recently.

"I go on Reddit and there are, like, A24 kids—it's a full-on lifestyle," Funk said. "Their merch drops sell, it's a full-on streetwear drop."

The mysterious Queens, NY-based graphic-tee-as-appropriation collective Boot Boyz Biz teamed with A24 for an Uncut Gems T-shirt that's now on Graded for $105. ("Rare. Sold out in seconds," reads the listing.) The horror movie and metal band-inspired merch duo Brain Dead, started by Kyle Ng and Ed Davis, also lent their imprimatur to a line of A24 products.

“I go on REDDIT and there are, like, A24 KIDS—it’s a full-on lifestyle.”

The major collaboration thus far has been with Online Ceramics. Started in 2016 by Funk and Alix Ross—artists who had previously worked coffee jobs or in the studio of the painter Laura Owens—Online Ceramics makes shirts that are the apparel equivalent of a peace sign embraced in a hug on acid. Designs feature flower power catchphrases in old-school typefaces smashed up against a series of cartoon touchstones, such as flute-toting minstrels, hopping frogs, smiling turtles, butterflies, and many, many Grateful Dead references. They recently also had a show of their paintings and sculpture at David Kordansky Gallery and naturally made merch tees to commemorate the occasion. (On sale for $55 at the gallery website, now $150 on Graded.)

Their interest in A24 began when the buzz out of Sundance for Hereditary reached Ross, who watched a preview, agape.

"I watched the trailer and I was like, we have to make merch from this movie," he said.

They finished making the design— which featured a scene from the movie wherein a screaming Toni Collette is confronted by her husband, on fire, on the front, with the blurb "A journey through the deepest and coldest level of hell" in classic O.C. script on the back—even though they couldn't initially connect with anyone at the movie.

"I didn't even know what A24 was at the time," Funk said.

"We made the designs and we were gonna release it bootleg," Ross said.

"We were still pretty small then, we could have gotten away with it," Funk said.

Eventually, a friend put them in touch with Zoe Beyer, the A24 creative director and architect of the company's social media voice back in the embryonic days, and the rest is history. They've now branched into hardware, crafting swords for 2021's The Green Knight. They are planning to make more shirts and "other things beyond shirts" tied to the studio's slate this year.

But as with indie four-pieces minting merch, there is always the question of when the band will sell out. Over the summer Variety ran a story claiming that A24 had been exploring a sale of the studio, and the price it was floating was between $2.5 billion and $3 billion. Suddenly, A24 was no longer the underdog but the corporate overlord. And the fun side project of selling stuff on its website didn't seem as quirky.

When asked about the potential sale of the rival studio this summer, Tom Quinn, founder of fellow independent production and distribution company Neon, told Deadline his own studio would stay the course before adding, "I can assure you that what we will not be doing is selling $50 candles."