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The rumors are true: Olivia Rodrigo's debut album, SOUR, is phenomenal. Unfortunately, her album merch is a phenomenal letdown.
After SOURdropped in May 2021, fans of the 18-year-old singer — myself included — excitedly rushed to order the angsty album on vinyl along with SOUR jewelry, apparel, and the crown jewel of Rodrigo's merch: bucket hats.
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As is often the case with merch, the prices seemed a bit steep. But while scrolling through Rodrigo's digital store in bed one night I thought to myself, "Nicole, you haven't really spent a lot of money in the past two (!!!) years, and crucially, everything sucks. So you can buy some merch as a treat."
In addition to SOURon vinyl ($26.98) I ordered a gorgeous light lavender bucket hat ($30) that said, "it's brutal out here" (lyrics from Rodrigo's track, "brutal") in black, lowercase letters.
Three long months later, the hat that I was sure would become a staple in my Sad Girl Summer wardrobe, arrived. And I fully regret the purchase.
The warning signs
Before we get to my hat disaster, let's back up a bit. When July started, I couldn't help but notice that the merch I ordered in May was taking an awfully long time to arrive. Taylor Swift's folkloremerch took more than five months to arrive, but still. I wanted that bucket hat before summer ended and things weren't looking good.
I knew COVID-related shipping delays were normal, but a whole new fear arrived on Aug. 3, when I saw a group of fans on TikTok had finally received their orders and the merch looked awful.
God, it's brutal out here. Credit: SCREENSHOT: TIKTOK The #sourmerch hashtag on TikTok currently has 27.6 million views and is largely filled with videos from young disappointed Rodrigo fans. Many of the videos are from dissatisfied customers using the Green Screen effect to make expectation vs. reality type videos. They compare merch photos shown online to the wildly different items that arrived at their doorsteps, and the differences are extremely apparent.
My colleague Elena Cavender, 21, ordered a black sweatshirt with SOURwritten in white letters and she was so disappointed with her delivery that she gave the piece of clothing away.
"Basically it took forever for the sweatshirt to arrive and then when it did arrive it was a lower quality sweatshirt than anticipated. And it's pretty hard to mess up a sweatshirt," she said in a Slack DM.
Cavender explained that the 'sour' lettering on the sweatshirt was a lot smaller than advertised, so she decided to give the purchase away.
"...I have high standards for my sweatshirts, sorry Olivia!" she said.
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Other unhappy customers are using TikTok and Twitter to show sweatshirts, shirts, and shorts that arrived in different colors or lengths than they appeared online. Some customers even claim purchases that feature the album name, "SOUR," spell the four-letter word wrong. And the bucket hats, my gosh, the bucket hats. Dare I say, they were brutal.
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Bucket hats fit for babies
My bucket hat arrived on Aug. 10 and at first glance it looked much better than I expected. Though the shade of lavender was visibly darker than the shade of Olivia's hat and the eyelets and accents were white when they were supposed to be lavender, I felt blessed that the hat wasn't the shockingly bold Barney purple I'd been seeing on some merch.
Looks more like a flattened gumdrop than a bucket. Credit: NICOLE GALLUCCI The words "it's brutal out here" were a bit misaligned, but I told myself the chaos was cool. In the moment I just felt grateful the person who made this hat included an apostrophe in "it's." (A huge opportunity for disaster.)
I'm not going to lie, the inside of the hat wasn't great. There were stray strings, unsecured pieces of fabric, visible elastic, and some type of white mesh that screamed "swimsuit lining." It was hideous, but ultimately tolerable.
All that really mattered was that the hat fit, and reader, hear me when I say it didn't.
The evolution of an Olivia Rodrigo bucket hat. Credit: MASHABLE COMPOSITE: NICOLE GALLUCCI The photo on the left shows the bucket hat resting atop my head naturally. It could fall off with one wrong move because it's barely grasping my skull. Unlike the roomy, comfortably-fitting hat in Rodrigo's promo pics, the top section of the hat that arrived wasn't deep enough for a head, and the rim was way too big.
The center photo is what happens if you slightly flip the hat's giant rim upwards, just in case you thought that would help the situation. It doesn't. You just end up looking like Gilligan of Gilligan'sIsland, Mrs. Puff from SpongeBob, or Madeline in the 1998 film Madeline. Even Paddington Bear looks better.
The photo to the right is for anyone reading this who thinks I wasn't securely fastening this hat on my head. I flipped the rim all the way up so you can see the elastic situation that's going on underneath. The hat doesn't comfortably move down my head any more, unless I force it, in which case my head feels like it's being crushed and going to tear through the fabric Hulk-style.
How was it possible that this allegedlyone size fits all hat was this snug on me?I wondered. Was my head the problem?
Growing desperate for answers I whipped out a measuring tape and found the circumference of my skull: 21.75 inches, close to the average circumference of women's skulls, ~21 inches. I then measured the elastic portion inside the hat: ~20 inches. Interesting.
I reminded myself that the hats were small for other customers, including tweens and teens, and decided my 28-year-old skull wasn't the issue. It's clear some of these hats are child-sized! Perhaps Olivia Rodrigo has an uncommonly small skull, but it's likely that these bucket hats, like so many other pieces of SOURmerch, just got effed up. (When you attempt to navigate to Rodrigo's general merch store today you're redirected to her "SOUR Prom" collection — a completely different set — instead.)
If Rodrigo channeled her inner "brutal" and said, "I want it to be, like, messy" when asked her vision for this merch, then she succeeded spectacularly. But in my opinion this merch is just a tragic mistake. Spending $30 for a hat that doesn't even fit my head? No thanks! I'll be asking for a refund.
I'm sure all Rodrigo did was try her best and this is the kind of thanks she gets. So it's worth noting that even though fans are airing their frustrations online they know this mishap isn't the singer's fault personally and still admire her.
We still love you, girl. But even you have to admit this merch is brutal.