Exit through the gift shop: What makes for good (and bad) museum merch? | Canada Voices

After a recent visit to Highclere Castle in the U.K., a friend sent me a souvenir tube of wildflower seeds gathered from the castle’s meadow, along with a tea towel inspired by Downton Abbey, which was filmed on site.

We had been joking that we’ve entered our “happiest when shopping at a museum gift store” years – for mementos, yes, but also for clothing and homeware. The best merch goes beyond the usual array of postcards, jigsaws, water bottles and umbrellas. The less predictable, the better. My reading chair, for instance, features a pillow upholstered in fabric designed by Bloomsbury Group artists Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell from the Charleston Museum.

“For visitors, walking around exhibit halls, visiting the gift shop, and eating at the food service are all part and parcel of the same event – the museum experience,” wrote Lynn Dierking and John Falk in The Museum Experience, their 1992 analysis, which dramatically altered how museum professionals understood their audiences.

Not only does merch offer financial rewards (Museum Store Association data suggests it can generate up to 25 per cent of an institution’s revenue), but it’s also psychologically important. Souvenirs reinforce a lasting connection to the work and the artist. And the qualities that make for successful merchandise go beyond exclusivity.

New York’s Neue Galerie Design Shop understood this a decade ago, when it introduced an exact replica of the indigo blue linen painting smock worn by artist Gustav Klimt. That sort of offbeat inspiration – the knowing, insider wink coupled with a smidge of camp – excels at courting aficionados.

The concept more recently hit home at Wes Anderson: The Archives at London’s Design Museum, a retrospective of the filmmaker’s meticulously crafted cinematic universe. Gallery rooms dedicated to each film feature sets, costumes, objects and ephemera. Anderson’s attention to detail extends to the exclusive editions in the gift shop as well. I wanted it all, and I’m not even much of a fan: the yellow Limoges porcelain cup and saucer from Le Sans Blague café in The French Dispatch, surface prints illustrating various vehicles from the films (such as the jetpack from Asteroid City), and necklaces and brooches featuring the pink Mendl’s pastry box from The Grand Budapest Hotel.

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But kitsch isn’t the only thing that sells. To mark That Green Ideal, the largest Emily Carr exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery in more than two decades, the museum released performance socks and technical shirts featuring Carr’s abstract trees and skies in collaboration with Canadian cycling brand Samsara. The gear both captures and encourages the intrepid, outdoorsy spirit of the B.C. artist while underlining the theme of how Carr turned to the landscape for renewal and transcendence.

The Louvre (the world’s most visited museum, according to the Art Newspaper’s 2025 annual attendance survey), has economies of scale on its side. It specializes in delightful recreations inspired by its permanent collection, such as the gold bangle worn by the concubine in Ingres’s Grande Odalisque. At the Tate Modern and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, respectively, American artist Jenny Holzer’s truism “You are guileless in your dreams” is transposed onto the straps of a silver weekender bag, and designer Thom Browne’s signature grey suiting adorns limited-edition nesting dolls.

But even more modest institutions offer their share of art-derived delights: the Cincinnati Art Museum, for example, translates Edward Hurley’s painting The Midnight Mass into an evocative snow globe. And at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax, home to Maud Lewis’s Painted House, enthusiasts of the Canadian folk artist can cuddle up with a plush version of her real-life feline, Fluffy. It’s a toy so sweetly realistic it might have been plucked directly from her paintings.

I had high hopes for the V&A South Kensington’s Schiaparelli exhibition gift shop, but the only quirky item in sight was a DIY embroidery kit for the Jean Cocteau design that features on the designer’s evening coat from 1937 (the same year she launched her landmark Shocking perfume). Schiaparelli’s fragrances haven’t been in active production for years, and the absence of a Shocking lipstick or scent felt like a missed opportunity. A sophisticated audience of international visitors would have been the ideal low-risk setting to test a revival – particularly since the show piques curiosity with an alcove devoted to her provocative fragrance artistry.

Fortunately, the custodians of Schiaparelli collaborator Salvador Dalí are commercial in all the right ways. Home to more than 2,400 works, the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla., offers well-made reproductions of famed pieces such as the artist’s bejewelled Ruby Lips brooch (his homage to Mae West) and The Eye of Time. The latter is a costume jewellery replica of the surrealist brooch whose pupil is a working Movado watch movement (only four are known to exist). Other wares include a sleep mask of Dalí’s startled eyes and a melting clock candle made entirely of wax – memorable, clever mementos worthy of their namesake.