Someone Dared to Host Commemorative Fyre Festival Merchandise Pop-Up

Hannah Abrams

Almost one year ago, the ill-fated Fyre Festival took place on an island in the Bahamas. If you recall, tons of concert-goers were left stranded when the music festival was canceled at the last minute (after they paid top dollar for “exclusive” tickets). Ja Rule’s reputation hasn’t been the same since, and Billy McFarland, the event’s founder, is facing jail time and massive fines.

But there was one winner of the Fyre Festival: the merchandise. Those attendees unfortunate enough to be stranded at the horrendous music festival turned their lemons into lemonade, and sold the merchandise they purchased at a major profit on eBay.

Now, according to Gothamist, the Fyre Festival merchandise is getting a re-release for an NYC pop-up, and people have a lot of questions.

It turns out Fyre Festival isn’t hosting the merchandise pop-up (probably for the best), but instead, someone purchased a ton of the merchandise at auction.

An email obtained by Gothamist went out earlier this week telling people to “come celebrate and relive the epic event” at a merchandise pop-up. While there was not much information provided about what merchandise would be available, a spokesperson for the event told Gothamist that the hope was the pop-up would be entertaining, and that they hoped to make fun of the festival by having the promo video play for the entirety of the pop-up.

Details might be scarce, but a writer at Digg did manage to attend the event. The cheapest Fyre Festival merchandise available was a $50 baseball cap, and a hoodie cost $200.

One person who probably does not find this pop-up funny is Billy McFarland, but for the rest of us, this seems like a clever way to take advantage of an awful event and wasted promotional merchandise. While we’re not advocating that anyone hosts a disaster event and defrauds attendees just to sell failed merchandise a year later, it’s nice to know there’s always a positive.

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