Dine and dashing — digesting the odd pairing of J. Crew and The Bear

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This article was published 13/07/2024 (491 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Movie and TV merchandising tie-ins have been around almost as long as movies and TV, dating back to 1929, when Walt Disney charged $300 for a likeness of Mickey Mouse to be used on children’s writing pads.

Some merch makes sense. If you really like Star Wars, you might really like making a 7,500-piece Lego model of the Millennium Falcon.

Other tie-ins range from inexplicably odd to violently discordant. Take Old Yeller dog food: If you love your pup, you probably won’t want to vividly flash back to the 1957 film’s traumatic, childhood-wrecking conclusion every time you fill your canine companion’s dinner bowl.

So, what to make of the recent limited-edition merchandising partnership between J. Crew, the high-end American clothier, and The Bear, the hit series that just wrapped its third season (with episodes available to stream on Disney+)?

At first, this line of merch seems puzzling and unlikely.

Established in 1983, J. Crew initially made its name with outfits that gestured towards East Coast, upper-class, old-money cachet. There was a kind of “Dartmouth lacrosse team” vibe to its Reagan-era catalogues.

The Bear, meanwhile, takes a tragicomic look at The Original Beef of Chicagoland, a rundown Italian sandwich joint located in a Chicago neighbourhood with deep working-class roots.

Combine these two for an “exclusive collaboration,” and you end up with, well, a $582 work jacket. Yup, the line includes a cotton canvas, chain-stitched beauty of a jacket with a logo that riffs on the show’s fictional blue-collar brothers Neil and Ted Fak. The Faks are the go-to guys who show up to fix The Beef’s damaged condensers and broken bread mixers.

Also referencing the Faks and their odd-job business, Matter of Fak Supply, is a $73 T-shirt that will advertise the wearer’s proficiency in “electrical, appliances, plumbing, HVAC, drywall, painting” — all maintenance tasks you probably won’t want to undertake while wearing your costly new J. Crew duds — and a $173.50 sweatshirt you probably don’t want to risk getting covered in veal stock.

This quintessentially late-capitalist joint venture also includes a mesh-backed trucker hat for $86.50. (And sorry, Bear devotees, some of these items have sold out.)

As a fashion statement, J. Crew’s line of Bear-themed clothing is being both castigated as a deeply cynical ploy to rebrand working-class grit as luxe leisurewear and celebrated as an overpriced but harmless bit of fan service.

It’s hard to sort out what’s going on because The Bear itself is hard to sort out. Over the course of three seasons, the series has explored complicated, sometimes contradictory attitudes towards 21st-century labour and consumption.

The show follows Carmy Berzatto (played by Jeremy Allen White), a Paris-trained, James Beard award-winning chef who is working in a Michelin-starred New York establishment when he comes home to try to save his family’s greasy-floored, hole-in-the-wall resto after his brother’s sudden death.

Against a backdrop of parking-lot meat deals, ever-present antacids and near-constant yelling, Carmy eventually decides to chase his own Michelin star. He wants to switch over to a menu that offers things like “nettle purée” and design that channels organic Scandi minimalism, while still operating a walk-up window to sell traditional Italian sandwiches to the restaurant’s original customer base. Can it possibly work?

The Bear serves up a lot of social and political layers, all sandwiched between the grief and guilt of family dysfunction. There are issues of gentrification and authenticity and “realness”, with ideas about changing neighbourhoods, shifting economies and waves of immigrant experiences. There is nostalgia for old Chicago — that “City of the Big Shoulders,” “Hog Butcher for the World,” “Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat” and all that — alongside excitement for a newer, younger, hipper town.

Commentators can’t quite agree on what the show is saying. One analyst suggests The Bear is “an example of worker solidarity, understood in the strictest Durkheimian way.” Another critic condemns it as a sneakily seductive justification of gentrification and neoliberal economics.

In flashbacks to Carmy’s previous jobs, at pretentious, exclusive, ruinously expensive restaurants where he would plate 14-course meals using tweezers, we see the pursuit of excellence often has a terrible human cost.

But the show isn’t entirely on the side of Original Beef. It’s telling that a lament by one of Carmy’s co-workers for the passing of the old neighbourhood, with its grotty taverns and diners, is interrupted by stray gunfire.

A promised fourth season of the show might give us even more on the paradoxes of work and consumption, getting and spending, in our precarious times. In the meantime, fans of The Bear can thrash out these ideas, maybe at a place with industrial fittings, faux dive-bar décor and $17 cocktails, maybe even while wearing $86 trucker hats.

alison.gillmor @freepress.mb.ca