The evil weed is back again-in style, if not necessarily in substance, popping up in song lyrics and trendy clothing stores. After vanishing from pop iconography for a good decade, the marijuana leaf is suddenly adorning hats, shirts and belt buckles faster than you can say, “Didn’t we make this mistake already?” Hip boutiques in New York and Los Angeles sell a line called Weed Wear. And San Francisco boasts clothes made out of hemp. “Pot fashion?” says Ian, 24, an accountant, in a Seattle espresso bar. “You don’t have to go to a head shop to find that.” Then he opens his coat to reveal a T shirt with a pot leaf and the words NATURAL HIGH.
The trend’s most pervasive symbol is the red and white logo for Phillies Blunts. Phillies is a brand of cheap cigars that are sometimes hollowed out and filled with pot, creating an uber-joint called a “blunt.” Last year a small New York company called Not From Concentrate printed the logo on T shirts and caps. “It just, like, took off,” says Stash, the company’s aptly named co-owner. “It’s like Warhol’s Brillo box.” Now Stash and his partners, Gerb and Futura, are trying to staunch a flood of fake Phillies T shirts. Dozens of fakes were seen at this summer’s New Music Seminar in New York, one of the industry’s top events, where a panel discussed “Pot in Pop: Let’s Be Blunt.” Phillies’ parent company, Hav-A-Tampa, which licensed the logo to Not From Concentrate, now has second thoughts about the stogie’s new cache. Says vice president Tony Barone: “[We are] extremely concerned about any abuse or misuse of the Phillies Blunt cigar.”
In a loopy way, this resurgent reefer madness is consistent with the earthy ’90s climate. These days, pot is as much a symbol of simplicity and health consciousness as it is a companion to one’s Pink Floyd CDs. “Today a lot of people look to it as a healthy high,” says Julian, 20, of Seattle. That’s a dubious premise. But clearly, it resonates beyond the unreconstructed stoner set. “It’s not the hippie types buying the pot shirts,” says Rob Innes, a clerk at Roxy Music, a Seattle record store that sells pot-wear. “It’s a lot of the clean-cut student types.”
Like most youthful trends these days, this one started with rap. Parents can specifically blame Cypress Hill. The Los Angeles-based group sings the praises of weed in songs such as “Something for the Blunted” on its million-selling debut album–and is the official band of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML). It was soon followed by rappers such as Redman and Dr. Dre, whose “The Chronic” is the number-four album in the country–even the title is a slang reference to cannabis. “Now it seems there aren’t any rappers who don’t rap about blunts,” says Jon Schector, the editor of the Source, a hip-hop magazine. Predictably, white stars followed suit. And not minor ones but million-sellers like rappers House of Pain and Sinead O’Connor, who declared last year that “selling marijuana is one of the most respectable things anyone could do.” And the Black Crowes display pot leaves on stage and lobby for decriminalization.
It seems a contradiction that marijuana fashion is rebounding without any demonstrable rise in actual use. But this generation consumed the ’60s counterculture through television, as pure style. So it’s now responding with style abuse more than actual substance abuse. The leaf icon, once a rebel image, now seems almost benign: even the new president and vice president have indulged. But as always, one worries whether this first step will lead to harsher measures, as the twentysomethings repeat the baby boomers’ descent through harder drugs, Earth shoes, solipsism, the ’80s. Already there are some disturbing signs. Bell-bottoms are back, and dippy mysticism has returned to pop lyrics (“The earth is reconnected/The signal is ready to be sent,” sing the English group Spiral Tribe). One worries, one worries.
