Beige Is the New Hype

Every pop star of sufficient fame eventually launches a fashion label. It’s practically a contractual obligation at a certain altitude of celebrity—the moment "artist" expands to "brand" and the merch table graduates to a proper lookbook. Justin Bieber took his time, but Drew House is here now, named after his own middle name, launched roughly in parallel with his marriage to Hailey, and it is exactly as muted and vaguely confused as all of that biographical context suggests.

The palette is beige, burgundy, navy. T-shirts and hoodies decorated with a repurposed smiley face or the wordmark, fifty to a hundred and fifty dollars a piece. Models wearing the clothes stare into the camera with a conviction the garments themselves don’t quite support. In a streetwear landscape that has been accelerating toward louder and more aggressive branding for years, a collection of resolutely boring neutral sweatshirts feels almost confrontational. Not because the clothes are good—they aren’t especially—but because they refuse to try. The fashion world performs sincerity so exhaustingly that something this deliberately unimpressive reads as a kind of statement. Whether Bieber intended any of that or just likes beige is genuinely impossible to say.

His ex Selena Gomez clearly invested more thought into her fashion work. Bieber seems to have put in roughly half the effort and is winning anyway. Maybe that is the actual future of all this—a world where taste collapses entirely, where everything is equally muted and ironic and fine, and Justin Bieber turns out to have been ahead of the curve all along. That’s either a compelling argument or a horrifying one, and I still haven’t decided which.