Wearing His Face, Owning the Devotion

Sometimes you find a piece of merchandise so perfectly absurd it loops back around to sincere. A T-shirt covered edge to edge with Ryan Gosling’s face. "Ryan all over me." Subtle it is not.

Here’s the thing about Gosling: he occupies a rare position as a man who is essentially universally desired across gender and orientation, and who seems almost deliberately designed to make everyone slightly insecure about it. He’s handsome in an architectural way, does the kind of acting where nothing appears to be happening and then suddenly everything is, and has the specific quality of cool that looks effortless because the effort happened years ago and got quietly buried. Drive. Blue Valentine. The Place Beyond the Pines. Even the meme years—the "hey girl" era—somehow made him more endearing rather than less.

I’m not going to pretend I don’t have a considered appreciation for the man. You’d have to be paying very narrow attention to miss what he’s doing.

The shirt is, objectively, ridiculous. It is also, I think, the correct response to celebrity worship—take it all the way to absurdity, wear the face of your admiration across your chest, walk out into the world and own it fully. We’re all devoted to something embarrassing. At least this one has good bone structure.