When software logos became streetwear
Vintage Apple T-shirts from the 1980s and 1990s now sell for hundreds of dollars on Depop and Grailed. A 1997 book documenting those designs, “Apple T-Shirts: A Yearbook of History at Apple Computer,” can fetch up to $850 for a first-edition copy. The designs themselves are rudimentary—some playful, some purely functional—but the demand reflects something larger than the garments. Software company merchandise has become collectible.
That appetite extends to current releases. At Figma's Config 2025 conference in San Francisco, the pop-up store drew lines around the hall, with attendees waiting to buy pieces from the company's Season 4 collection. Brand designer Gustavo Delgado describes the response as a sign of how much Figma means to its users. Config keynote speaker and streetwear figure Jeff Staple compared the release to a Supreme drop.
This trend has a name: corpcore. It describes a sensibility that embraces both nostalgic software logos and the tech companies people feel connected to today. Users wear apps on tote bags, hats, and water bottles the way they might wear a band shirt or a sports jersey.
Nostalgia for the early web
Stewart Scott-Curran, co-founder and creative director at Design Business Company, attributes the appeal of vintage swag to nostalgia for the early internet. “A lot of folks of a certain age who are now in tech grew up with Microsoft as one of the first things they interacted with,” he says. That affection extends to the Apples of the world and the early days of Microsoft.
The author of “Apple T-Shirts,” Gordon Thygeson, compared shirts to bumper stickers in the book's introduction—a way to advertise achievement or identify with a successful group. For today's buyers of vintage tech apparel, the statement comes with ironic distance, since the era of those companies as insurgent forces has passed.
From irony to earnestness
Contemporary corpcore carries its own irony, sometimes bordering on the absurd. Cash App commissioned designer Marshall Columbia to create club-kid pieces modeled by Julia Fox in 2023. Overtime released limited-edition Dunkin' Donuts apparel. A South Korean clothing company acquired rights to sell Lockheed Martin-branded polo shirts and track suits.
For designers, the challenge is balancing earnest and ironic tones. Stewart cites Supreme as a model: its collaborations range from Louis Vuitton to SpongeBob SquarePants, leaving room for ambiguity. “It's a bit of both, and that's where the interest and dissonance come from,” he says.
The most significant shift, though, is in craft. The era of branded pens, stress balls, and white-label Patagonia vests is over. Companies now produce goods with attention to construction—the GitHub x Cotopaxi hip pack, Perplexity's embroidered sweatshirt, or Notion's monogram onesie all reflect an effort to create objects users genuinely want. “There's an inherent irony to wearing corporate gear, but our job is to apply taste to the vernacular, so it's not just retro or staid,” says Garrett Morin, co-founder of G.E.O., which helped design Figma's Season 4 collection.
Delgado sees a trajectory from internal swag, through the awkward logo-driven phase of corpcore, to the present. “More companies are starting to dial in what makes them unique,” he says. Wearing company merch, in his view, now signals allegiance to values rather than just a logo. “The appeal of trying to be ironic, that's had its peak. We're moving toward wearing what you want as a true expression of who you are.”
Figma's community experiences manager, Jordan Scott, recalls skepticism when she proposed a store at Config in 2023. “People were like, ‘No one wants to buy our stuff,'” she says, but attendees stood in line for two hours. Even free conference swag sells on eBay, and a limited-edition trading jacket worn at Figma's NYSE listing day fetched $550.
Designing for the community
For its Season 4 collection, G.E.O. drew from '90s desktop computing, featuring anthropomorphized office supplies that evoke Microsoft's Clippy and illustrations referencing open-source clip art libraries. The approach aimed to be tongue-in-cheek without being corny. “Instead of taking these images and putting them on a shirt, which would be the historically corporate approach, we're reframing them with a contemporary line quality, with humor,” says Garrett.
Early explorations spanned a soccer kit inspired by teamwork, automotive styles based on “auto layout,” and a '60s New Age aesthetic tied to Figma's collaboration features. Some ideas leaned more humorous: a teddy bear shirt reading “software,” or a Monster energy drink logo turned into an F. Ultimately, the team chose to emphasize craft over meta-commentary.
G.E.O. co-founder Elizabeth Dilk says the goal was a collection the team and community would both wear with pride. “Figma is a tech company, but more than that, it's a creative community,” she says. The production process involved walking factory floors, comparing cotton weaves, and fine-tuning ink blends for puff printing.
Seeking aura
Walter Benjamin argued in 1935 that mass reproduction stripped artworks of their “aura”—their singular, authentic quality. In an age of unprecedented mechanical reproduction, consumers may be starved for that quality in the TikTok sense as much as the philosophical one. We want style and authenticity, not throwaway tees.
Where corpcore once served purely pragmatic purposes—commemorating a conference or product launch—it now communicates identity. “For an audience that's very plugged in, and probably works in the tech community, corpcore signals, ‘Hey, I'm on the mission,'” says Stewart. “‘I'm on board.'”
