The much-anticipated Oasis reunion Live ’25 tour kicked off in Cardiff over the weekend. And as expected, scores of the 140,000 concert-goers across the two nights in the city’s Principality Stadium were clad in Oasis merch, including branded bucket hats, band T-shirts (past and present), and the Oasis x Adidas collaboration, which dropped three weeks ago and has largely sold out online.
On Tuesday morning on London’s Carnaby Street, around 50 fans eagerly queued outside the pop-up Oasis fan store, which opened its doors at 10am in anticipation of the band’s five-night run at Wembley Stadium, starting 25 July.
Brie, 26, from Melbourne, flew to the UK last week and is attending the Oasis show in Manchester on 11 July. She arrives an hour early at the London fan store, with hopes to buy a blue T-shirt and a black long-sleeve, and wear them to the gig regardless of the weather. “I buy merch at every concert I go to because you don’t get physical tickets anymore to show you were there,” she tells me. “I’ll wear the merch to the show and then wear it all the time after.”
In anticipation of the Oasis reunion ticket sale this weekend, fans and brands are already spotlighting the band’s signature style online.
“I went to the pop-up store in Cardiff before the show to get the football shirt, but it was out of stock in my size,” says Karina, 22, from Poland, who was queuing with her friend Kay, 23, from Tokyo. “We want to get merch to remember the concert,” Kay adds. “I’m going to try and get tickets for the Tokyo dates in September, so I want to wear merch for that.”
Ever since the Oasis reunion was announced in August last year, sales on Oasis-style garments like bucket hats and parkas have skyrocketed. Anticipating the demand, Oasis’s record label, Warner Music Group, decided to open the fan stores in vacant retail spaces across the UK via its merchandise division WMX, selling Oasis tees, shot glasses, cutlery and even babygrows. The Manchester store was first to open on 20 June, and had fans queueing from 1am the night before, per Manchester Evening News. Other open — or coming-soon — locations include Cardiff, Birmingham, Edinburgh and Dublin.
Oasis merch-mania is the most recent example of a trend that’s been brewing at the intersection of fashion and music for some time, notably with Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, Beyoncé’s Renaissance and Cowboy Carter tours, and Charli XCX’s Brat tour. In a world where consumers are increasingly seeking cultural resonance and connection from their clothes, music merch has become a key status symbol. What’s more, short-form video apps like TikTok and Reels have democratised concert tours and helped audiences find their fandoms online.
Just days before the London Oasis fan store opened, Sabrina Carpenter fans queued around the block for the artist’s pop-up shop in Shoreditch, ahead of her BST Hyde Park gigs over the weekend. For Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour last year, the brand took over an entire floor of Flannels’s London flagship, selling merch ahead of the gigs, while Billie Eilish opened an experiential fan store in New York last October to align with her 2024 tour via photobooths and hangout areas. With an average annual growth rate of 2.6 per cent since 2024, the global music merch market will be worth $16.3 billion by 2030, according to a report from Midia Research. And while show-goers could align with the Swift and Beyoncé tours by wearing handmade beaded bracelets or Western looks, for Oasis, it’s all about the band logo, experts agree. Which, in turn, creates opportunities for fashion brands and retailers to launch collaborations and retail experiences.
Fashion brands pile on
The Adidas collaboration launched with a campaign starring Liam and Noel Gallagher, as well as a big party in London. Scores of images from the Cardiff weekend show fans (and Noel’s daughter, Anaïs Gallagher) wearing the Adidas x Oasis Harrington jackets, bucket hats, polo shirts and three-stripe long-sleeves, which range from £28 to £95.
Italian Oasis fan Benedetta, 42, attended the Cardiff show. But when she got to the merch stands at the venue, the Adidas collaboration had sold out, so she hit the London fan store on Tuesday in the hopes of securing some pieces. “I’ve been a fan since the ’90s, and I want to get some merch to remember the gig,” she says in the store queue. “If I get some today, I’ll wear it all the time.”
Alongside Adidas, several brands and retailers are tapping the Oasis opportunity. Burberry featured Liam’s children Lennon, Gene and Molly in its festival campaign last month, while Stone Island, one of his most-worn brands during the Oasis heyday, featured the frontman, alongside Gene, in various campaigns over the last year, following the reunion announcement.
Manchester-based label Represent launched an official Oasis merch collaboration last month, with hoodies, T-shirts, mugs and rugs retailing from £40 to £150. Last week, Amazon opened an Oasis storefront with re-issues of vintage merch retailing from £24 to £30. Luxury retailer Selfridges, meanwhile, opened a dedicated vintage Oasis merch space with vintage sourcing label Not/Applicable, with rare merch going for up to £1,200.
“Merch is having a moment, and it’s bigger, broader and more culturally potent than ever,” says Parisa Parmar, senior creative strategist at entertainment marketing agency Attachment. “What was once a simple band tee has evolved into a powerful brand extension tool, spanning industries.”
For artists, too, merch has become a more important revenue driver, as the dawn of streaming slashed royalty revenues, meaning artists must rely on income from tour and merch sales. For brands, it’s appealing for several reasons, says Marguerite LeRolland, head of apparel and footwear at data analytics firm Euromonitor. “The limited-editions and exclusive collaborations with artists create a sense of exclusivity and urgency that boost sales in the short term. And most importantly, these collaborations serve as a longer term strategy to increase brand recognition and consumer loyalty by building a positive association with cultural icons who boast huge communities of fans and a cross-generational appeal.”
However, with growing market saturation and increased competition from unofficial sellers, the merch market’s growth is set to slow to 1.6 per cent post-2030, Midia Research also found. To stay ahead, artists and fashion labels need to consider timing and positioning in order to sustain demand.
Charli XCX’s Brat merch underlines that point. Unlike Oasis, which has capitalised on pre-show demand, the pop star released merch for her album Brat over a month after its release. But thousands of units of unofficial merch had already been sold on platforms like Etsy, and brands had capitalised on the buzz by releasing Brat green products that weren’t even officially affiliated with the tour. According to Midia, roughly a quarter of merch purchasing behaviours are detached from record labels or artists, validating the need for Oasis fan stores ahead of the event, to harness demand for the full tour cycle and drive fans to official offerings, rather than just during or after the show. Perhaps, Warner Music Groups took learnings from Brat. (The record label represents both Charli XCX and Oasis.)
Represent announced its Oasis collaborations shortly after the tour was announced last summer, to build anticipation, brand co-founder George Heaton says. “We had it in the locker already, and with their team confirming our designs were good to go. We had such a huge impact with that preview that when it came to launch in December 2024, our followers knew,” he explains. “On launch day, we collaborated with Oasis on the social posts and had not only the greatest amount of likes, comments and shares on that post we’d ever had, but the fastest sell-out of product too.”
The rarer the better
Mass-produced concert merch is one thing. But for superfans and affluent consumers, more niche collaborations or vintage merch pieces are driving revenue for fashion brands and retailers.
Not/Applicable is an LA-based vintage clothing label founded by former Selfridges head of menswear Natasha Advani in 2022. Ahead of the Oasis tour, the brand has expanded its existing collaboration with Selfridges (which began shortly after its launch), providing vintage Oasis merch for a shop-in-shop, selling rare and hard-to-find merch for as much as £1,300.
“Oasis is an iconic British band that we admire, so we wanted to celebrate this with an amazing curated edit from Not/Applicable,” says Bosse Myhr, director of menswear, womenswear and childrenswear at Selfridges. “[Vintage merch is compelling] because of the uniqueness of the design, the wash, the fade of the graphic and the fit. It’s something that is hard to recreate, and we are seeing our customers looking for originality, which Not/Applicable offers.”
Last year, Not/Applicable curated a selection of Swift merch to align with the Eras tour, with pieces from her very first tour all the way up to present day. It sold out in 24 hours, Advani says, even pieces retailing for hundreds of pounds.
“Superfans, in particular, are driving disproportionate value for the merch business,” says Parmar. “They’re not just consumers, they’re cultural distributors. They’ll amplify your message, defend your brand, shape narratives in your favour, and do the legwork of community-building, on their own time. And merch gives them the vehicle to do it. It allows fans to represent, to signal allegiance and to become part of the artist’s legacy.”
Represent modelled its Oasis collaboration designs on vintage merch, to play into the nostalgia and the popularity of the aesthetic. “We grew up listening to rock and roll, so we collected band merch. Then, when we started going to Los Angeles through the past decade, we realised the vintage band T-shirt culture was so strong — it’s something we wanted to play a part in, but in a unique way,” says Heaton. “For us, that meant not only recreating the essence of a heavily worn rock tee, but bringing it to scale with luxury finishes and our handwriting through our graphic designs, as well as the fit, feel and fabrication details.”
Many young music fans are turning to Depop to find handmade, secondhand or vintage music merch, says Steve Dool, Depop’s senior director of brand marketing. “The Depop community has consistently told us that they value the authenticity of buying an original vintage piece, rather than a new, fast fashion, licensed item,” he says. “There is also the scarcity factor to some degree — retro band tees, for example, have become the ultimate collectors’ items as artists release limited runs of official merchandise, often connected to a specific tour or album — and those get harder and harder to find as time passes.”
Strategic co-creation
To continue to drive sales, fashion brands should view merch as a strategic co-creation opportunity, aligning with the artists’ ethos and values, experts agree. “Merchandise has evolved into a personalised extension of an artist’s creative universe, one that reflects not just the music, but the broader aesthetic, mood and language of a release,” says Parmar. “Being a fan today goes beyond simply knowing the lyrics, it’s about fully inhabiting the world an artist creates. Merch has become a key medium through which fans can do exactly that.”
Advani recalls a merch collection Not/Applicable did in collaboration with Grimes, ahead of the artist’s 2024 Coachella DJ set. “Grimes [cares] about sustainability. So she didn’t want to put more junk into the universe. But her fans are die-hard Gen Z fans and they want merch,” Advani says. As a solution, Not/Applicable sourced a limited run of 1,000 vintage sci-fi, technology and fantasy T-shirts, and Grimes created her own AI artwork, which was then printed over the vintage tees. They also added a micro-chip, so that the consumer could tap it on their phones and access exclusive content. “So there was this [great] moment where we were managing to capture them digitally, futuristically and also sustainably, with a cool vintage piece that the generation is into.”
Not/Applicable also added a mystery buy element to the T-shirts, akin to the mystery boxes that propelled the Labubu trend, where customers were unaware of what colourway they’d receive. “It went viral on Reddit, because everyone was taking pictures of themselves and asking if they could swap pieces with other people within the fan base community,” Advani says.
Artists are also getting creative and looking at new categories beyond fashion, as consumers increasingly invest in homewares and collectibles. Oasis has gone beyond just T-shirts in its merch range to include cutlery and glasses, while Beyoncé incorporated candle holders, pillows, perfumes and wall prints to her Renaissance and Cowboy Carter offerings, of which the artist’s online shop says will provide “eye-catching ways to celebrate your fandom while adding flair to your home’.
Merch grants permission to tap into powerful levers like nostalgia marketing and to extend relevance beyond the product drop, adds Parmar. Adidas, for example, used the Gallagher brothers in its campaign, but also shot high-exposure images of young people wearing the collaboration, which looked like they could have been shot in the North of England in the ’90s. “Smart brands think past the main event — a show or a tour — and build pre-show energy with exclusive content and early-access moments. This creates a full cultural runway and not just a merch moment,” she says.
There’s not just the Oasis tour in 2025. Blackpink, Eilish and Lady Gaga are all embarking on world tours this year, creating further opportunities in the merch market. If the Oasis tour is anything to go by, as artists try to cut through in 2025, perhaps we’ll see more variation in what merch means, how they make it and where it’s sold.
Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com.
Correction: The story was updated to reflect Not/Applicable was officially founded in 2022. A previous version said it was founded in 2016 when Advani started sourcing vintage.
Parkas, bucket hats, band tees: Will the Oasis reunion revive Britpop style?
