The Upside Down Goes to Market

The second season of Stranger Things landed in October 2017 carrying the weight of everything the first had earned. That original run had been a genuine surprise—nobody expected a show about a missing kid in a small Indiana town, filtered through a very specific memory of 1980s Spielberg and Stephen King, to detonate the way it did. By the time Season 2 was approaching, the Duffer Brothers were no longer making a cult item. They were managing an event.

Which is exactly when the merchandise arrives. Topshop and Topman released a Stranger Things collaboration timed to the premiere: twenty-eight pieces built around the show’s iconography—the logo, the Demogorgon, the fairy-light alphabet wall, Eleven in her pink dress with a box of Eggos. The Topshop flagship on Oxford Street dressed itself up as the Upside Down for Halloween, which depending on your tolerance for that kind of retail theater is either inspired or deeply unnecessary.

I don’t begrudge the merchandise. The show had earned it. What Stranger Things did in those first two seasons—and did well enough to be genuinely affecting—was use genre nostalgia as an emotional delivery mechanism rather than an end in itself. The references to E.T. and It and Poltergeist weren’t just winks at people who grew up in the eighties; they were load-bearing. You cared about Eleven because the show understood what it meant to be an outsider in a small town with no language for what you were. The horror scaffolding was the container, not the content. The merchandise caught that too, at its best: the Stranger Things logo alone carries a feeling, which is more than most franchise branding can claim.