How 'Marty Supreme' Took Over Streetwear and Turned Movie Merch Into a Must-Have
Fashion
A24 has taken movie merchandise from obsolete to on-the-street. Now, Safdie enthusiasts, NYC sports fans, and hypebeasts around the world are lining up to market the awards season contender for them.
Forget the feigned PR romance or viral press junket, all it took was a windbreaker to market Josh Safdie’s “Marty Supreme.” In anticipation of the 2025 Christmas release of the A24 title, Los Angeles fashion label Nahmias teamed up with the indie studio and Timothée Chalamet’s stylist, Taylor McNeill, to create a capsule collection of sportswear-inspired merch, including the now-viral track jacket sent to athletes and celebrities around the world. The collaboration with Nahmias marks A24’s latest addition to its repertoire of unconventional marketing strategies: designer fashion.
Since the production company’s 2012 inception—back when all A24 meant to your average beanie-wearing black-coffee-drinker was a seat assignment on their flight to Japan—the studio has built a reputation for unconventional film marketing. From diamond-encrusted Furby pendants for “Uncut Gems” (only 100 made and sold out in minutes on the A24 website) and catfish Tinder profiles for “Ex Machina” to coyly branded A24 tote bags and fictional marriage announcements. A24’s Nahmias collaboration was the cherry on top of an already involved marketing campaign, which began in November with a ‘leaked’ meeting between Chalamet and the A24 marketing team, portrayed by a cast of unknown actors. Throughout the convincingly staged Zoom recording, Chalamet plays a parody of himself, pitching outlandish ideas with a mix of misused industry jargon and invented colloquialisms. The actor’s fervent delivery is clearly satire, but his message foreshadowed the film’s actual marketing technique: “We have to be intentional, relentless, aggressive… we’re not trying to be chic, we are planting our flag,” he insists.
And plant their flag they did. “Marty Supreme” rolled out official A24 fashion collaborations with Nahmias, Golf Wang, and ‘47. Of these three collaborations—all of which, except a few Golf Wang pieces, are entirely sold out—the Nahmias track jacket went the most viral, with everyone from Tom Brady to Kendall Jenner spotted in it. The broader collection included branded trackpants, windbreakers, baseball caps, polos, sweat sets, socks, and key chains that were sold at a series of pop-ups across New York City, São Paulo, London, and Los Angeles. The apparel was priced closer to NBA merch than your average Netflix hoodie: $250 for a windbreaker, $30 for a pair of socks, and $120 for a jersey.
In keeping with the cross-section of greatness, New York City, and athleticism, the movie’s official Instagram announced a collaboration with the sports lifestyle brand ‘47 on January 23, repping the Knicks, the Jets, the Mets, the Yankees, the Giants, Liberty, the Brooklyn Nets, and the Islanders. At the time of the drop, “Marty Supreme” had been in cinemas for over a month, but the new merch still sold out.
Unlike A24’s approach to marketing “ Materialists”—a modern-day rom-com styled by Katina Danabassis, where the A24 shop online sold the exact ring “as worn by” Dakota Johnson in the film—the studio did not reference Miyako Bellizzi’s costuming for “Marty Supreme” in its merch. Instead, Nahmias paid homage to the type of sporty, masculine streetwear Chalamet is known to wear off-screen, mimicking modern sports memorabilia. Like the film’s unmistakable ‘80s soundtrack, the sweatshirt’s reverence to current streetwear and sportswear places the period film in the context of contemporary celebrity and notions of “greatness.”
It’s worth noting that“Marty Supreme” was not Chalamet’s first time spearheading a limited-edition merch drop, nor was it his first collaboration with Doni Nahmias. In 2024, Nahmias created 100 custom hoodies for the actor’s Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown,” which were released online and sold out in minutes. Unlike A24’s involvement in the rollout of “Marty Supreme” merch, Searchlight Pictures was untethered to the sales of the hoodie. Instead, the production company produced more traditional movie merch, including a sold-out sunglasses collaboration with Retrosuperfuture and a conventional selection of movie-branded T-shirts and hoodies.
For anyone familiar with streetwear resell culture, the fact that “Marty Supreme” windbreakers are fetching around $2,000—eight times their original price—on resale apps Grailed and StockX, should come as no surprise. Borrowing from the business models of brands that pioneered the idea of a limited drop, such as Supreme and Adidas, A24 has engineered a supply-and-demand discrepancy: scarcity made the windbreakers more coveted, and in turn, viral.
The last film to make this big of a marketing splash was “Barbie,” but even then it was better known for popularizing the color pink rather than selling out any one product. And while “Barbie” infiltrated niche corners of popular culture, like prebiotic soda and inflatable pink pool floaties, it was never cool or fashionable in the same vein as A24’s Marty Supreme merch. Where “Barbie” aimed to assert itself everywhere, “Marty Supreme” has targeted niche societal subcultures, like film bros and streetwear connoisseurs.
“Marty Supreme’s” foray into sportswear further cements A24’s off-screen aesthetic, allowing its fan base to participate in the aesthetic of its on-screen talent. Prior to the film’s release, A24 had already developed a widely recognizable cultural identity, operating as a lifestyle brand. Many seasoned movie-goers have expectations about the kinds of films A24 releases—think striking visuals, unconventional storytelling, and actors cast against type—but also about the trope of people drawn to them. At the same time, A24 resists easy categorization. Its catalog spans a range of genres, tones, and aesthetic approaches, making it difficult to reduce the company to a single visual style, narrative formula, creative figurehead, or hoodie design.
But what distinguishes A24 from legacy studios is not the consistency of its output, but the degree to which the studio itself has become integral to its films’ branding, curating its films under the umbrella of a broader, cohesive sensibility while still allowing for internal variation. As A24 continues to demonstrate its grasp of today’s social media-dominated attention economy, it will be interesting to see whether its fashion virality can extend beyond Timothée Chalamet and his star-studded circle and into a broader pattern within the industry.
