Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl appearance on Sunday sent a custom Zara jersey into a resale frenzy, with shirts reaching €30,000 ($35,673) on platforms like Vinted and eBay within 48 hours.
The Puerto Rican artist performed a set entirely in Spanish, watched by 140 million viewers, wearing a cream-coloured ensemble designed by Spain’s largest fashion retailer. The outfit was unremarkable until it became merchandise.
According to Bloomberg, Zara distributed a limited number of replica jerseys to Inditex employees on Monday, accompanied by a thank-you note from the artist. By Tuesday, dozens had appeared online. Some listings included authentication tags reading: “This garment has been created as a special gift from Benito to Puerto Rico.” The shirts were never intended for public sale. The scarcity created the value.
From Gesture to Transaction
The jersey itself carried symbolic weight. Emblazoned with “OCASIO 64” on the back, it referenced either his mother Lysaurie Ocasio’s birth year (1964) or a late relative.
The number also coincided with the year the US-Puerto Rico Commission examined the island’s political status. Bad Bunny has consistently used his platform to advocate for Puerto Rican independence and criticize US immigration enforcement, most notably during his recent Grammy acceptance speech.
Yet within hours, the gesture became inventory. Ownership signaled participation in a cultural moment without requiring engagement with its underlying politics. According to Adweek, Zara described the collaboration as helping “make Benito’s vision complete,” dressing his dancers, band, and orchestra.
The company declined to comment on whether it sponsored the partnership or whether Bad Bunny chose Zara independently.
Accessible Fashion, Inaccessible Replica
Bad Bunny’s decision to wear Zara rather than luxury couture was widely interpreted as a statement about accessibility.
Just days earlier, he had worn Schiaparelli’s first-ever custom menswear look to the Grammy Awards, where he became the first Latino artist to win Album of the Year. Choosing a mass-market Spanish retailer for the Super Bowl appeared deliberate. Reports noted that Zara is a brand within reach for many viewers, contrasting with the luxury runway that the Super Bowl stage has become in recent years.
The irony is that the accessible brand produced inaccessible goods. The replica jerseys were never sold in stores. The resale market transformed them into luxury items priced beyond most consumers’ reach. What began as a gesture toward ordinary fans became an object of speculative commerce. Cheaper listings without the thank-you note sold for €500 ($595), which is still well above typical fast-fashion pricing.
Language as Brand, Politics as Backdrop
The performance was a massive commercial event.
Bad Bunny opened with “Tití Me Preguntó,” singing in Spanish while carrying a football across a grassy field. He was joined by Lady Gaga (wearing a flamenco-style dress), Ricky Martin, Cardi B, Pedro Pascal, and Jessica Alba. While the set demonstrated the commercial viability of non-English entertainment in the United States, the political context received less attention than the fashion.
Bad Bunny has been vocal about ICE raids targeting Spanish-speaking communities, declaring at the Grammys that his community is human and deserves respect. His Super Bowl set occurred during a week of heightened immigration enforcement. The cream-coloured outfits were described in fashion coverage as hopeful in spite of the raids, but most mainstream reporting focused on style rather than the actual social struggles of the people the artist claims to represent.
What Travels, What Stays Behind
This moment illustrates a broader tension in how cultures circulate globally.
What travels easily are rhythms, aesthetics, and catchphrases. What stays behind are literature, cinema, philosophy, and political complexity. Latino culture becomes legible through reggaeton lyrics and fashion campaigns rather than through intellectual traditions or labor struggles. Spanish becomes associated with parties and beaches rather than with novels or ideas.
This affects language learning itself. Many people say they want to learn Spanish, but their interest centers on music slang and the aesthetic of confidence projected in popular media. Engagement with the actual societies that speak the language (their history, regional variation, and social movements) remains rare. The appeal is atmosphere, not understanding.
This process flattens complex identities into marketable symbols that require no context, producing a world rich in cultural references but poor in actual cultural understanding.
One Star, Many Erasures
Bad Bunny now occupies an unusual position as both artist and symbol, making Spanish-language culture visible while also concentrating representation heavily on one individual.
For audiences unfamiliar with Puerto Rican history, Bad Bunny becomes shorthand for an entire linguistic world spanning dozens of countries. One pop star stands in for centuries of literary tradition and countless thinkers whose work never enters the global spotlight because it requires patience or translation.
The Zara surge will fade and the listings will fall, but what persists is the mechanism by which cultural moments are converted into assets. The artist performed, the audience cheered, and the resale market did the rest. Somewhere between the performance and the price tag, literature became rhythm, and culture became a jersey worth thirty thousand euros.
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