When Jack Carlson wears his mom’s old green Lehman Brothers sweatshirt around New York City, people try to buy it off his back. “People will just come up to me and offer me money for it in restaurants,” said Mr. Carlson, 33, the founder of the clothing company Rowing Blazers, which sells a contemporary version of the so-called banker bag, a Wall Street accessory that dates to 1978. Branded merchandise of defunct investment banks that were key architects of the financial crisis in 2008: officially hot, if in an arch, allusive way. Buying and selling products associated with the crash has become, paradoxically, a thriving niche market. So too has memorabilia associated with other disasters in recent financial history, like the dot-com bubble and the Enron scandal.

Source: New York Times January 25, 2021 16:07 UTC