I Went To The Mysterious Fyre Festival Merch Drop And All I Got Were More Questions
How was your Monday? Good, I hope? Did you, at any point, find yourself wondering if you were the unwitting participant in a millennial reboot of MTV's "Punk'd?" Because, reader, I did.
Just past noon, a fellow Digg editor mentioned in Slack that they'd received an email from a pop-up shop claiming to have authentic Fyre Festival merchandise. With details scant, I wondered if perhaps that was the grift of the disastrous 2017 music festival all along: cook-up an event targeted at the worst, monied, Instagram "famous" influencers, trap them on an island, get written up by every publication under the sun and sell t-shirts and hoodies to those with hopeless cases of irony poisoning a year later.
I can't tell you that's not what went down.
That afternoon, we found out that another member of the Digg team received the pop-up shop email — both were contacted at their personal addresses. This, at least, piqued an intra-office mystery: why were they the only ones to receive the email? Were they, in any way, connected to the Fyre Festival fiasco?
By that point, word of the pop-up shop had spread around NYC Twitter like wildfire. Polly Mosendz, a writer at Bloomberg, had already gone to the trouble of contacting Fyre Festival's bankruptcy trustee lawyer. See, in the wake of the "music festival"-turned-ultimate schadenfreude experience of seeing rich twenty-somethings stuck on a Bahamian island with nothing to do and little in the way of basic amenities, Fyre Festival LLC was placed in bankruptcy and its founder Billy McFarland later pleaded guilty to wire fraud. Mosendz discovered that, wherever the pop-up shop got their supposedly authentic Fyre Festival merch from, it wasn't from a bankruptcy auction.
This suggested another possibility: What if this pop-up shop was being run by a totally unrelated set of scammers? There were now three explanations: (1) These folks are legit, they came into possession of official Fyre-branded merch and decided to make a quick buck, (2) as suspected above, this is a sneaky way for folks behind the Festival to make money off the disaster, or (3) maybe, just maybe, the pop-up shop is a grift on a grift, peddling counterfeit Fyre merch to whoever's gullible enough to buy it. Internet sleuthing could only go so far. The only way to truly find out was to just show up at this thing, and ask around.
I arrived at the address listed for the pop-up shop just before 6 pm, when it was scheduled to open. The email said the shop would be on the building's sixth floor — I hope, if there had been a third "6" in the email I might've been wise enough to avoid the devil's well-laid trap. After some (too much) fiddling with the building's intercom panel I realized there was no way the shop would be on the building's list of tenants. When I turned around I realized that a small group had conglomerated behind me. All of us were there to bear witness to… whatever this was going to be.
A minute later, someone heading to their fitness class on the second floor let the small crowd in. While we struggled to get the elevator down to the first floor, just before a group split off to take the stairs, one guy wondered aloud if getting stuck outside and then in the entryway was part of the experience, like a dose of the real Fyre Festival for those who missed it.
Once we got up to the sixth floor the group formed a line outside the door to The Sixth Floor Loft, the event space rented out for the pop-up shop (as befits the wonderfully creative name, the space underwhelmed once we were let in, giving the impression of a prom venue where half the decorations were left in someone's car).
While in line I spoke to Jake, a 27-year-old NYC resident working in the film industry. Jake heard about the pop-up shop from a colleague who read about it online — no lead on how Digg's people got emailed. Jake hadn't tried to go to Fyre Festival himself, but he knew people who went. "I thought it was kind of hilarious and terrible at the time," Jake said. "I'd love to have my own little piece of that memory." When I asked Jake what he thought the odds were of the merchandise being genuine, he gave it 50-50.
Just as the packed hallway became almost unbearably hot and my "Punk'd" paranoia reached its peak, we were led into the pop-up shop. There, on a couple clothing racks, were Fyre-branded hoodies, shirts and pants in white, yellow, cyan and black. The original Fyre Festival announcement video looped on the room's projector screen.
After snapping a few shoddy pics on my phone I made a beeline for the racks to scope out the merchandise and, more importantly, the prices. The cheapest thing you could get was a $50 baseball cap. $100 could get you a shirt, some pants, a useless Fyre Festival coin or a wristband. For $200, you could be the proud owner of a Fyre Festival hoodie, which, if the murmurs of eBay prices I heard in the room are true, would be a steal… if the merchandise is legitimate.
I got a few pictures of the tags on the clothes for the sake of reference later, but I was immediately struck by the variety of the options. If I were trying to counterfeit Fyre Festival merchandise, I'd still set the prices absurdly high (I majored in Economics, c'mon), but I wouldn't go to the trouble of making the fakes in such a wide array of styles and colors. There were even t-shirts for rapper and Fyre Media co-founder Ja Rule's 2017 tour with Ashanti, featuring just a tiny logo for the festival on the back. Producing tons of counterfeit merch in a bunch of different styles seems like a move that a simple get-rich-quick scheme would not take.
While the rest of the crowd continued ogling the merchandise — Jake, who I had spoken to in line, was now seriously considering buying the $50 hat — I and everyone else who was obviously there to write about the event started looking around for whoever was in charge.
I asked one of the guys standing watch around the edges of the room if he was one of the organizers. No, he told me as a woman with blonde hair orbited a GoPro camera on a swivel around us, this is just a part-time thing for him. He pointed me in the direction of the guy in charge.
That guy identified himself as Chris. He looked to be in his late twenties or early thirties, wearing one of the Fyre Festival shirts, normal glasses, shorts, some shoes that at least looked to be Adidas Yeezy Boost 350 V2s and a chunky wristwatch covered in diamonds.1 Chris said he didn't want to give out his name or do any recorded interview for fear of harassment from internet randos. I'm not sure if that made me think the event was more or less likely to be legit — he did tell me that he works as an investor and runs a non-profit dedicated to building homes in Bangladesh.
Chris claims the pop-up shop idea came together in just a few days (the WHOIS registry for the Fyre Merch site shows it was only registered last Friday) after he and his friends won an auction for an abandoned storage unit that held the merchandise. Somehow, Chris and company knew who had rented the unit — he wouldn't confirm that the unit was held by Billy McFarland, but implied as much — and swooped in to buy its contents at what he considered to be a bargain. Chris explained that he and some of his friends bought tickets to the festival last year. Three of their group ended up stuck on the Great Exuma island for a day while Chris and the others never ended up leaving Miami after the initial reports of dysfunction rolled in. This, he told me, was his way of making back the money they'd lost on the festival, and that some of the money would be going to his home building charity.
At this point, about 45 minutes after the opening of the shop, I'd seen maybe two or three people actually consider making a purchase. I don't know if Chris and friends set the prices too high or had fundamentally overestimated the actual demand for the goods, but at no point in the hour I spent at the pop-up shop was it ever packed with serious buyers. Though, I did hear a man say his "irony rotted brain" compelled him to buy a hat.
I shot off photos of the price tags and merch to Digg's Slack before asking Chris two follow-up questions. First, what's his plan for any merchandise they don't move with the NYC pop-up shop? Chris said he's open to setting up shop again in another city like Boston or Miami, or to selling the remainders over their website. Second, how did he put together the email list that included two Digg employees? That turned out to be fairly straightforward, but a little funny: Chris and friends bought an "NYC Millennials" email list from a marketing company, and it turns out that one subset of that list is every twenty-something New Yorker who bought tickets for Fyre Festival, meaning Chris received his own email promoting the pop-up shop.
As I left the loft, I considered how the Fyre Festival pop-up shop appeared to be, if anything, the polar opposite of the disaster it intended to profit off of. One was a ridiculously built-up promise that bilked hundreds of attendees out of tens of thousands of dollars, leaving many literally stranded on an island with limited access to food, water and shelter. Fyre Merch, on the other hand, was small and unimpressive while also being functional. It was, in the moment, even a little bit believable as something other than a complete scam (at least as much as anything using the Fyre brand can seem on-the-level).
Whether or not the merchandise is genuine, or if Chris truly lost money on festival tickets, or if any of the money he collected is actually going to a Bangladeshi charity, the barebones promise of the pop-up shop was fulfilled. You could take an elevator up six floors and exchange a hefty sum of cash for Fyre Festival-branded clothing. In that limited regard, the event was a success.
Case in point — after cajoling me into buying it for him, Digg social media editor Joey Cosco is now the proud owner of $50 baseball cap that says "Fyre" on it. When asked if he'll sleep well at night not knowing if the hat is genuine, Joey's sure in his answer. "I will sleep fine, because I believe the hat is real, and nothing can shake that."
If you have any information that could help verify the authenticity of Joey's hat, please reach out to @mathewolson on Twitter.
A previous version of this article stated that Chris's watch was encrusted with what I guessed were Swarovski crystals. In an email Chris clarified that the base model of his watch costs approximately $30,000, that his bears 17 carats of diamonds and that putting Swarovski on a watch like his "would be like spray painting a Bentley :)"
