I had long thought the prime era of off-the-rack identities was the 90’s: where which block of videos you watched on MTV came with a requisite mall store that sold the right clothes to go with your CD collection.

My old idea was that pop’s great flattening in the digital era mashed pop together into a miasma of generic genre roulette. However, that was just because music ceased to be the place where people discovered identity, at least in mainstream culture.

I totally get that musical subcultures are a thing that continue to exist, but record nerds are record nerds. I also get that movie posters were another key way to create identity out of pop culture, it's just another node on the family tree. The mall era was defined by being able to get these sort of preset identities. Hot Topic grew out of selling sad kids eyeliner and NIN T-shirts into a cavalcade of licensed merchandise of every kind.

Retro TV, new TV, Funko Pops, video games, and every other manner of pop culture tchotchkes replaced band t-shirts. Maybe the video store nerds were just ahead of their time. Hot Topic’s rabid diversification is just attempting to keep up with the trends of a decentralized pop culture generation. Fortnite can occupy just as much space as Game of Thrones in the cultural moment.

Depending on your age, you either are confused or saying “no shit.” It speaks to the proliferation of new culture that there are so many different things you can carry a banner for. There’s a cottage industry of mining Facebook ad data to create a custom t-shirts that are just random facts about you smashed together. “I’m an annoyed blogger who listens to angry music and I read too many books to keep on a shelf properly.”

We take these shining bits of other people's art and adorn ourselves with them like Magpies. Carrying them as evidence of the identity that we would most like the world to see. So it’s not that we’re beyond the off-the-rack identity era, it’s now that we can mix and match so deeply that the rack is endless.