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The Vanity Fair Oscar Party is like Hollywood’s prom. Just take this year’s iteration, held last weekend in Los Angeles: Glenn Close dancing, surrounded by people who are only a little less famous than her. Chloe Sevigny holding hands with best friend Natasha Lyonne. Jason Momoa twirling girlfriend Lisa Bonet. Adrien Brody...hanging out with Marilyn Manson?!
Man: what was Marilyn Manson doing at an Oscars after-party? Didn’t he peak in 1996? Isn’t his brand of shock goth passe? Hadn’t we decided his music was, like, mediocre?
In truth, the Marilyn Manson comeback has been a longtime coming. It began the same way many great American comeback stories do: with T-shirts. Back in the rosy little year we call 2016, when Justin Bieber was first revolutionizing the merch game on his summer tour, he enlisted Jerry Lorenzo to design a capsule of gothic-script tees. One such T-shirt was a $195 masterpiece that featured a standard Hot Topic-esque red-tone image of Manson, the man Hunter S. Thompson affectionately nicknamed “Shit Eyes,” with his name spelled “MAR1LYN MAN5ON.” On the back, it read:
Electrifying: was Bieber bigger than Satan, or was it Manson? Or was Satan a moniker for Manson, and Bieber was bigger than both of them? Or was it just a tender and twisted coupling of two musicians? Bieber wore the T-shirt when he finally met Manson, in Manson’s recounting, and told him, “I made you relevant again.” (Ouch.) Manson then told Consequence of Sound that Bieber is “a piece of shit” and that “[he’s] dick height on me, ok?” (Cool.) The two eventually made up with a series of text messages, as Manson rehashed on—where else?—the Howard Stern Show.
The following year, Lil Uzi Vert began to blow up, with his star-making verse on “Bad and Boujee” and his own single “XO Tour Llif3.” One of emo-rap’s pioneers, Uzi was also heavily indebted to Manson’s mall goth aesthetic, and when his Virgil Abloh-directed video for “XO Tour Llif3” arrived that summer, it was a full-on homage to Manson: grainy, demented, industrially freaky.
But two musicians, however wide their fandom, does not make a trend. It took (of course) Demna Gvasalia, who showed a pink tie-dye Marilyn Manson button-down in his Fall 2018 Vetements collection in Paris last January. In the meantime, the non-Bieber Marilyn Manson tee had a moment, too, with fashion week attendees and dubious fashion plates alike appearing in Manson gear.
Thirty-nine of Abloh’s friends, collaborators, and mentors—and the man himself—tell the definitive story of the designer’s ascent.
What’s with the Manson obsession? Another Demna moment might illustrate what lies beneath the appeal. At the Fall 2018 Balenciaga show in Paris last March, Gvasalia sent out a number of garments with a photograph of a fictional band called Speed Hunters—it was like fake tour merch for a group that appeared to be the Backstreet Boys by way of Nine Inch Nails, moody boys with an Adderall problem. The clothes provided the missing link between Uzi and Bieber, referencing the bottomless well of helpless teen sadness that all three musicians embody.
Manson is the face of mall goth: a kind of freakiness plagued by banality, whose shock value fits into a familiar consumer-driven paradigm of parental advisory and teen rebellion. Manson’s biggest fans, after all, are disaffected suburban adolescent white boys. (Manson’s music and image have been repeatedly tied to school shootings, most infamously the Columbine massacre.) The general Manson sentiment is now nostalgia for a time when the biggest threat to the things you enjoyed was Tipper Gore—and who wouldn’t be nostalgic for that? We all feel bad now, not just sixteen-year-old boys. And that kind of dark and ugly, but somehow safer, rosier malaise happens to be conducive to smart-phone scrolling, too.
But merch is one thing; a full-blown comeback is another, and that’s what Manson has managed to achieve over the past several months. His hit (lol) “Dope Show” appeared on the soundtrack for the most recent Palm Angels show, and the artist Connor Tingley promoted his new Nars makeup collaboration in New York Magazine earlier this month by saying that Marilyn Manson was a huge fan of the purple lipstick. Maybe she’s born with it; maybe it’s Shit Eye’s favorite lip color!