Endless Thread - Fruit of the Loom: Horn of Lies

Episode Date: August 14, 2026

The brand Fruit of the Loom is almost ubiquitous in the world of underwear and casual ware. You have likely seen its logo, if not on your own body, on store racks or at least in ads. Now, in your minds eye, picture it. What do you see? For years, countless people have been taking to the internet to share their memory of the Fruit of the Loom logo. A lot of them have the same memory – a basket, rather, a cornucopia of fruit. But they're all wrong. At least, Fruit of the Loom claims that is has never had a cornucopia in its logo and there is little concrete evidence to suggest that the brand is lying. So what could be behind this collective misremembering? This week on Endless Thread, Ben and Amory embark on a quest for answers: Is the Fruit of the Loom cornucopia simply an example of the Mandela Effect (a pervasive mass-misremembering of a fact or event), or has someone pulled the woolen underwear over our eyes? Show notes: Has the 'Fruit of the Loom' Logo Ever Contained a Cornucopia? (Snopes) Black T-Shirt logo (Reddit) Alan's Reddit post  This content was originally created for audio. An auto-generated transcript is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Heads up that some elements (i.e. music, sound effects, tone) are harder to translate to text.

WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Hey, can I ask you a question? Okay. So we're from public radio. We're exploring a mystery about fruit of the loom. Do you know what that is? Yes. Can you tell me what it is?

It's a underwear brand. Do you remember the logo of this brand? Yeah, it's a basket of fruit. A basket of fruit. Okay. Maybe a cornucopia of fruit. Or a cornucopia of fruit. Yeah.

How'd I do? Beautiful. You passed the test. You passed the test. What's your name? May we ask your name? Randall. Randall?

Randall. Yes. Randall Moore. A couple of summers ago, we took a little field trip on foot, just a few blocks up the street from the WBUR office in Boston. Which is where we met Randall, clearly, but this was just the beginning of our adventure. We had a theory to prove or maybe debunk? What if I told you? you that the Fruit of the Loom logo never had a cornucopia in it?

Then I probably made something up in my mind that wasn't there. Now, we're going to guess that you've either listened to our show for long enough or you're online enough to know that what Randall is hinting at here is the Mandela effect, a potent and pervasive misremembering of something. Like, for example, that Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 80s, He didn't. But these misrememberings are collective, meaning Randall isn't alone. So far from it.

Countless people for years now have taken Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, and beyond to, like Randall, share their memory of the logo for the underwear, casual wear, whatever wear. Rand, Fruit of the Loom. But unlike Randall, a lot of them aren't ready to accept the fruit, the whole fruit, and nothing but the fruit. At least the whole fruit according to Fruit of the Loom itself. That's right. Fruit of the Loom says there is no cornucopia. There has never been a cornucopia ever, no matter what the internet thinks.

So you're telling me the Fruit of the Loom logo never had a cornucopia. They've straight up been lying to us saying that it never existed. No, I remember this vividly. Fruit of Looms is like, no, it was never there, was just a fruit. Why do tell is the most iconic. iconic part of this logo, a cornucopia that has been burned into my brain. Y'all remember this too, right? Like, I'm not just bugging. You are not just bugging. Not as far as we're concerned. We are cornucopia truthers.

But peep the logo on the Fruit of the Loom website today. And what do you see, Ben? So we got three different kinds of grapeish-looking items. and some what looks like lettuce and a big old apple stuck in the middle. And underneath it, large lettering that says fruit of the loom. But no cornucopia. But as is sometimes the case, in order to really tackle an online discrepancy, we have to go offline to flip through the tags of actual old t-shirts to see the cornucopia of our mind's eye with our actual eyes.

And where better to do that, we told Randall, goodwill. Okay, well, good luck with that. Unless you have a fruit of the loom undershirt on right now in which we'll happily take it from you. No, no, you got to go up the street, sorry. Thank you, Randall. Thanks, Randall. Appreciate your time.

You're a good sport. I appreciate you. Have a good day. So up the street we went to the horn of plenty, that is a mass. Thrift Store. To do our part for a nearly decade-long online saga that continues to bear new and different fruit, from the Mandela effect to a conspiracy theory, to a counterfeit operation? I'm Ben Brock Johnson. I'm Amory Severson, and you're listening to Endless Thread. Coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR Coronacopia.

Today's episode, Fruit of the Loom, The Horn of Lies. I bet we could figure that out. Okay. Thanks. Yeah. So we've just entered the Goodwill on the street from our office. And we need the T-shirts. We need the lights, yeah, yeah.

We need the, like, old sports T-shirts. There are T-shirts here, but... Okay. We can look in here. Okay, before we get too deep into the racks, we need to explain ourselves a little more. Because, Ben, normally when a group of people online say one thing, and the company at the center of the claim authoritatively says another,

that's the end of it. Case closed. But as this literal deep dive demonstrates, we were among the people who just weren't buying it. I wasn't buying it. And there are reasons for that. So let's trace the history of the mystery a little bit. Okay, yep, I'm with you.

Okay. The first mention of a cornucopia memory that I found online was a Reddit post from nine years of, ago in the Mandela Effect subreddit. Okay. So was this the first ever post about it? Probably not, hard to say. But even in this nine-year-old cornucopia post, someone comments, I remember there being one, too,

but according to the company, there's never been a cornucopia. And then they drop a link to a particular page on the Fruit of the Loom website, which isn't broken, but doesn't go where it used to. But the mystery gained a lot of momentum. in the last few years, which I credit to some snarkiness from Fruit of the Loom itself. So in January of 2022, the company posted on X, quote, Did it hurt when you realized our logo never had a cornucopia? That's kind of spicy.

And then in 2023, the company posted a screenshot of a USA Today crossword puzzle. The clue for one of the things, 14 across, was fruit. of the blank, company that, in fact, does not have a cornucopia in its logo. Okay. And their caption for this post was, the Mandela Effect is Real. The cornucopia in our logo is not. Yep. But, you know, I'm a believe it when I see it kind of person.

And if I was going to believe that the logo that I had in my head for Fruit of the Loom was not and never was the logo for Fruit of the Loom, I was going to have to dig through some old T-shirts first. All right. Let's get back to the racks. Okay, how do we, um... I'll look on this side. Yeah, you look on that side. Okay. It's like, how can we do this so that we're not just doubling each other's work?

I found my first fruit of the loom show. What? No. Oh, my God. It's just fruit. Okay. But it was still exciting. Look at this, look at this one.

This person wrote their name, Ruta Kudgemore. in the shirt. I think it's a Ruda. You found a fruit of the loom and no cornucopia. Just fruit. It's not old enough, though. Which shirt was that? We've got to go old school.

This shirt. This shirt is clearly not old enough. Ah, another fruit of the loom. Just fruit. Oh, man. See? Just fruit. It's like the dude shirt zone. Yeah, this was definitely the right place to go.

But look. It's like I should be expecting something else. It's just fruit. Oh, God. Keep getting so excited just finding the brands. Okay, spoiler alert. We found a lot more Fruit of the Loom shirts, some older, some newer, but we found zero cornucopias.

What we did find, among the racks, though, was a college kid named Will O'Brien, who we put the same open-ended, neutral questions to about the logo. I'd say there was a cornucopia. In the logo? Yeah. You think there is one? Yeah.

What makes you think that? From my childhood. Yeah. I was younger. I'm sorry I got there was one. Right. But what if I told you that Fruit of the Loom says no cornucopia never was? Just fruit.

I've seen that. I don't believe it. So we told Will about the cornucopia-less shirts we'd found. That's weird. Right? Do you believe in alternate timelines? I believe that there's different universes where there's the same thing, just different tweaks. You're a multiverse, you're down with the multiverse?

Yeah, I think that's true. I can see that. Could prove the Lume cornucopia be like a multiverse thing, do you think? No, because we're in our timeline. That's this kid. Fades, get over here. Fades is Will's buddy, Brendan Vidal. And Brendan had a different take.

I know there's like a maybe a Mandela effect thing going on with the cornucopia, though. I've heard about that. He's heard of it. But you're no cornucopia, your team no cornucopia. I am. I think it's because I know it, though. You know about the Mandela Effect thing. Exactly.

Like originally, I did think it was there, you know. You're not no cap. You're no cop. Yep. Conacorpia. No, absolutely. Exactly. It's perfect.

The pro copes and the no coats. And you're pro coop. I'm pro-cope. All right, we got a pro-cope and a no-cope. I feel like that's all we needed. So, Ben, part of the reason why you have pro-coops in a seemingly no-cope world is because for just about every post you see online about how the cornucopia is make-believe, there's another with an image of the logo that we all seem to remember with a cornucopia.

Yes. And there are pictures of T-shirts with this cornucopia logo all. over the internet, including a post on X from 2024 with a picture of a faded black t-shirt. You know the one I'm talking about? Yeah. Where the cornucopia logo isn't just printed on a tag that could have been like swapped out for the original tag. It's printed on the shirt itself, the like tag-less tag approach. Yeah, yeah. I remember this. Yeah. Yeah. And still, Fruit of the Loom says, nope, no cope. In fact, they used to have a page on the on their website devoted to their quote unquote fruit story in which they showed the Fruit of the Loom logos throughout the years dating all the way back to 1893.

What's your fruit story? You know what I mean? We should all have a fruit story, you know? You're so right. I love it. I eat it every day. I'm going to send you these logos. I want you to bring these to life for us a little bit.

When you go back to 1893. Mm-hmm. Of fruit of the loom. Yep. This is much more of a, it's a still life kind of vibe. Mm-hmm. It's bringing like a Thanksgiving vibe to me. Yeah.

In a way. And then 1927, it moves into a ovular situation. There's an oval there. Mm-hmm. With pretty much the same setup. But then in 1962, it jumps. to more of the logo that we all recognize. It's like less of a still life and more of a animated look.

Yeah. 1978 is very similar. And then current fruit of the loom basically loses the oval, brings the fruit forward. It's a very fruit forward logo. It's fruit forward, yeah. What do you notice about the leaves in like the 60s and 70s as compared to now.

Interesting. They are brown. They're brownie. Browning. Mm-hmm. So which, you know, sort of like it almost like suggests the Rutan woven basket vibes. Yeah. But that's not enough to have made me think it was a cornucopia.

I'm just not lying that. I don't think so either, but this is a theory that people have floated online like, oh, once you see the brown leaves, Maybe we all just assumed that that was like a basket, our brain played tricks on us. That's assuming some pretty big leaps and bounds, I would say. You don't just plop a cornucopia in your memory. Cornucopia is a pretty, that's a rare item. Right. So the company has been having some fun with all of this on TikTok.

You have an active TikTok account. And they've been posting videos like this one. Read the caption. When you learn about the Mandela Effect and finally realize why everybody keeps talking to you about cornucopoeus. Yeah, press play on that bad boy. Oh, boy. Oh, my God. It's just a ridiculous eyes and mouth.

Some very unsettling human eyes and mouth inside of the logo. And they have a lot of videos like this, but stick with that one. Look at the first comment on this video. There was a cornucopia, though, right? And Fruit of the Loom says? Oh, this is from Fruit of the Loom. Oh, I didn't even pick that up. We plead the fifth.

Oh, my God. See, now they're just like, now they're trolling everyone, which is kind of what they were doing from the beginning. They were like, oh, my God, we can totally lean into this, right? Like, I feel like, yeah. Yeah. You can't trust the corporation. They're not going to, unless we get an official answer from them,

They are not, anything they post on social media is suss, as far as I'm concerned. Yeah, and they'll heart comments where people talk about seeing a cornucopia on their old, like, shirts in the family. Of course they do. They'll respond to claims of seeing the cornucopia with like the little eyes emoji or write, we can't confirm or deny. Yep. Which is especially confusing because their website absolutely denies that there was ever a cornucopia. But yes, I wanted to hear it from an actual Fruit of the Loom employee. Their comms team has never.

gotten back to me. So I went on LinkedIn and started looking for former Fruit of the Loom employees, which is hard to do because they have thousands of employees now. They've had thousands and thousands in the past. But I did find some, emailed several, only heard back from one, a guy named Nelson Feliciano, who told me the company, quote, never had a cornucopia in its logo, just like it never had a banana among the fruit. People see what they want to see. Just because the masses think something is true doesn't make it true. So I, I posted to my social media circles to see if anyone that I knew had a connection to Fruit of the Loom. And someone wrote me back saying like, no, but have you ever seen their old commercials with the crazy fruit guys?

Have you seen these commercials, Ben, from like the 70s? Why stay big on underwear? Come on. You don't have to spend the lot for quality underwear. Indeed, we've got life to spend X. I'm softness. I think so. Okay.

Well, this was kind of a revelation to me because I'm like, oh, of course, the commercials. Like, they can take a cornucopia out of their logo online if we want to go sort of conspiratorial. They've removed it. But it would be a lot harder to take it out of old commercials. That's true. Here's one that you just need to see because these are so silly. This is from 1987. Fruit of a balloon knows your boys are rougher than ever.

Destruction on wheels to a pair of briefs. That's why Fruit of the Loom introduces the unbustables, our best-built boys briefs ever. Okay, how do I describe it? It's like, it's about little boys being real hard on their underpants. I don't care about the little boys. I care about the fruits. I just find it weird that they're like, your boys are hot tub on their underwear. And then it like zooms into a kid's butt on a bicycle, whatever.

And then there's like these guys dressed up as giant fruits. and there's like a green grapes guy, there's an apple guy, there's a kind of weird looking leafy guy, which is, that's not a fruit, but he's there. No, but he's the leaves in the logo. Have you gotten to the logo yet? The unbustables, do from the unbeatable fruit of the loom. There's no cornucopia in this commercial.

No cope. I watched a lot of Fruit of the Loom commercials, including ones from the 90s that I would have been more likely to remember, but had no memory of. This is definitely an era. Okay. Who's under where it's under there? Fruit of the loom.

Because it fits. Do your boys hang low? Do they wobble to and pro. Can you tie up? But no cope in any of these commercials. And maybe no hope for the pro copers among us. But there was one more curious thing that surfaced online during this internet fruit fight. And that is an applicating.

to the United States Patent and Trademark Office submitted by Fruit of the Loom in 1973. And what's included in the mark information on this application? Design search code 05.09.14, which is, quote, baskets of fruit, containers of fruit, cornucopia, horn of plenty. Hmm. Horn of Plenty. Interesting. Yeah, some people thought that this was a smoking gun. Like you were trying to file for a cornucopia in your design, but Fruit of the Loom says, A, the actual image they were trying to register did not include a cornucopia, which is true.

You can see the image on the application. And B, that design search code mentioning baskets and a cornucopia, is really just meant to help the patent and trademark office search for applications and logos with similar features. So it speaks to like the mental association we make between fruit and cornucopias, but not to Fruit of the Loom ever actually having one in its logo. So all of this information now lives in the FAQ section of Fruit of the Loom's website. They've taken it out of the Fruit Story page.

It's now the FAQ page. Much less intriguing than a fruit story. I know. And that page links to a Snopes article that I absolutely need to shout out because they searched newspaper archives from the 1910s all the way up through the 2020s thus far in search of a Fruit of the Loom logo with a cornucopia in it. No cope. They found no cope. Snopes found no cope. Snopes for Snopes. No cope for Snopes.

And this piece also identifies the source of two common cornucopia. logos that circulate online, one of which first surfaced on Imger in 2017, but was popularized by a BuzzFeed quiz in 2019. Oh, God, it always goes back to BuzzFeed, ruining it. Yeah, well, this is how this one spread, because it was a quiz devoted entirely to misremembered logos. Oh, my goodness. But the other Cornucopia logo that circulates a lot was created by Fruit of the Loom itself in 2022. Okay.

On April Fool's Day. Okay. So remember the like faded black t-shirt that we were talking about with the Kornicoapio logo? Of course, of course. That logo in that t-shirt was the April Fool's Day Fruit of the Loom logo, which means someone either did a great job photoshopping that shirt or there could be something else going on here. A theory we heard when we ran into someone we knew on the way back. from our hopeless, copeless field trip to Goodwill. You're not wearing a Fruit of the Loom shirt by any chance right now, are you?

No, this is Polo. No, this is Polo. And these are Haynes. Oh, yeah. Okay. All right, very stylish. If you could conjure up. Thank you for showing us your underpants. Yes, thank you. I mean, you guys were inquiring. I figured why not, you know. I appreciate that thorough answer. This is sound designer Marquis Neal, a name you might recognize from our credits as of late,

and he is a proud member of the pro-cope community. despite being a Haynesman now. I definitely remember seeing a basket of fruit on my underwear is. I'm not crazy. I'm not either. I'm sticking to that. I'm sticking to I'm not crazy they are. But once he pulled out his phone and looked it up.

There's really no basket. This is crazy. I'm going to have to Google. On Marquise's phone, it was all Coke, baby. This is, yo, yo, all right. Is there two different internet? Because this is crazy. What is this?

A collective. Misremembering is what the Mandela effects is. Time out, time on, time on. It's like we're all crazy together. I got a conspiracy. All right, let's hear. What if this one is the bootleg brand, and we've been buying the bootleg brand

and not the real brand the entire time? I like this theory, too. This is an interesting idea, and it connects to something that I found on Reddit more recently, and I talked to the person who posted that thing on Reddit. So there's some hope for Cope. And we're going to talk about that in a minute. There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice.

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at WBUR.org.org slash creative studio. Every episode of Planet Money begins with a question. Can we help people rise out of poverty by improving the neighborhood where they live? What would you build on a piece of land when all the normal rules go out the window? What do robot chefs mean for the restaurant industry? Planet Money helps you find answers by going to places, watching people, and sometimes robots, at work, and asking questions. Listen to Planet Money on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcast. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry.

But, but we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully, make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know. wherever you get your podcast. So, Amory. So, Ben. We keep Cope alive by keeping Hope alive about Cope.

But you and I are increasingly, even as journalists, amongst a vocal, I don't know if it's a majority or minority, of people who cannot find real evidence of the Cope. No. However, I found what I believe to be one of the closest things I've seen to hard physical evidence of the cornucopia on Reddit. So this was a simple image post and it had very small amount of text attached to it. It was like, huh, this is interesting. Looks like this one has a cornucopia, something to that effect. And it was a photo of a hand holding a pair of socks. and the label wrapped around the socks had the cornucopia.

It said fruit of the loom and it had the cornucopia. Now, look, there's a million of these things floating around the internet, right? But the original poster claimed to have seen the socks in real life. It was their hand holding the socks. Okay. in the country of Columbia. What time is it there? Right now is 9.14 p.m.

I found the original poster, also in the country of Columbia. No, I didn't go to Columbia. I wish I had gone to Columbia. But anyway, I found him. He goes by Alan. When I first got him on the line, I was on video. Alan was not. We connected over Discord.

Alan said, oh, you're like a stereotypical white dude with a beard who has a podcast. Get him, Alan. I immediately knew I was in for a ride. And then he was like, are you famous? I'm a podcast public radio famous. Does that count? I don't know. You kind of sound like one of the.

those guys that makes video essays or something. Alan took a minute to warm up, even though he was funny from Jump. But he also seemed like almost genuinely excited. It was my first time being interviewed for anything. So I did ask Alan for his full name. He declined. I don't like to use my real name because, well, you know, my parents teach me not to tell everything to strangers on the internet.

They're smart. But I was also a little skeptical of Alan because, you know, You know, here's this 20-year-old guy. He is extremely online, as far as I can tell. And when you're extremely online, you are, I would say, more likely to engage in snark and sarcasm and shit posting, et cetera, especially if you are on Reddit. I play video games, talk to friends through Discord, lower screen social media like Twitter or Reddit, and watch a lot of YouTube.

I asked him when he first learned about this particular... a cornucopia thing in the fruit of the loom logo. Kind of a tricky question. I mean, it's like, when was the first time you ever learned about apple pie? I mean, it's just like one of these things in the popular collective that you just kind of know. Maybe when I was 10, 20 maybe, those early years when you're in the internet and you maybe come across some kind of like top 10 Mandela FX or some like short

video explaining that. Okay, maybe that's a big range, but, you know, I asked Alan to tell me the story of finding these socks in the real world. Let me recall my thoughts. Okay. I'm taking you at your word, by the way. So this, if you're like shit posting me right now, I'm just letting you know I'm taking you at your word.

Oh, no, absolutely. I'm telling you exactly how I remember. Well, my memory is not that good. But I'm being 100% sincere in this. Okay. I found this sucks while I was doing some like errands with my mom in this chain supermarket. Okay. That's what called?

It's called Exito. Exito. This is a Colombian supermarket chain. It's like kind of generic. Okay. Having never been there, Emery, but looking at photos online. Exito is like Walmart combined with Family Dollar maybe. It's got a lot of different kinds of things going on.

And there was this bin of like bargain clothes. And there was like a metal basket full of this socks. And I noticed the logo that was the Fruit of Reloom thing. Yep. And when I watch it, I said something like, huh, wasn't this like a Mandela thing? and then I because I remember like the famous

Mandela effects things there's the bursting bears there's like the Monopoly guy and then there's the fruit of the loom thing but they say that people think

that they saw the fruit of the loom with the cornucopia or something and then I look at the sucks and I see clearly the packaging

with the fruits of the loom that it was a calf flu of the loom and he had the cornucopia and it was confused so I

picked up my phone, I went on the internet, and I looked at the Fruit of the Lume, Mandela effect. And there it was. Supposedly, the Fruit of the Lume logo never had the chronocopia, but yet there it was. I had it in my hand. What do you think, Amory? Do you believe him? Sure. I was in a similar headspace.

And I think, like, Alan, he was sort of shocked that this had seemingly not happened to anyone. else ever. In the internet, when I went to look it up, there was never some kind of like, the definitive, like, physical proof that the cornucopia was there. It was always just like the edit of the logo. I even looked around to see if it was like a pirate thing or like a knockoff version. But apparently it was the fruit of the loom thing. It's set made in USA, I think.

My next question, Amory, of course, was, did he buy the same? Sox. This post was several years ago that he put up. It was in 2024, I guess, at this point. Okay. Yeah, that's when this was really popping. And Alan is now 21. In that time, I didn't have money on my own.

And I showed it to my mom, and I told her that the whole thing about the Mandela fate. But it ended up more like curious oddity than something we needed to buy. So mom held the purse strings literally. And so he did not buy the socks. But I was still stuck on this idea, as were some Redditors who commented on Alan's post, that this could be a fake image. What about the people who say it's BS? If I remember correctly, I posted that photo before AI generated imagery was become popular. I mean, back in that time,

The best AI generator images or videos was Will Smith eating the spaghetti in that grotesque way. Amrade, do you remember the disturbing Will Smith eating spaghetti videos? I missed those ones, but I'm not sad to have missed them, it sounds like. Oh, God. Yeah. Do yourself a favor. Don't look those up. I shan't. A.I images weren't maybe as much of a thing back then, but like Photoshop was. Yeah. Yeah. This jump. out to me too. And, and, you know, I should say, Emery, I didn't mention this before, but Alan is currently studying at University in Columbia for audiovisual arts,

which kind of made my ears perk up, right? He's good with computers. He's studying visual arts. This guy probably knows his way around messing with images on computers. You promise on your life that you didn't Photoshop these Fruit of the Loom logos onto the socks. Unless I have a really big brain hemorrhage and I'm misremembering or some like person made like a hoax of all this and they gave me an amnesiacs, I could 100% swear to you on my life that that was how I found it. Yeah, so that wasn't a no. That was like everything but a no. That was quite the tap dance of an answer. But anyway, he and I talked about a plan to do some legwork for us.

Promise you this. Tomorrow I have to go to the university and in my way back, I can go to the very same supermarket. And I mean the very same one where I took the picture to maybe see if they still have those socks two years later. If you are able to talk to somebody and get more information, that would be incredible. That would be huge. Of course. This could be an adventure in it of itself. See, Alan's with us, man.

You know, I'm starting to like Alan. So he promised we could talk the very next night. And we did. I'm very excited to ask you about your adventures today. How did it go? Just bustering my resume with some journalistic on-the-field investigations. This guy. He knows what's up.

Yes. He does know what's up. Emery, you might ask, were these investigations fruitful? Were they then? Is this a horn of answers? Was there an answer nestled perfectly inside a cornucopia of information? Because, you know, as the learn Spanish on tape commercials used to say on the radio, Amory, It's as easy as spelling S-S-C-K-S.

That's what I want. That's what we want, right? Yes. I'm familiar with that reference. C. It's unfortunately to say I do not very good news. The investigation seems to have hit a little bit of a war, which says I went to the very same supermarket in which I took the photo. I talked to a very lovely lady, which was the manager of the storm,

which she unfortunately told me that given the amount of time, it was basically impossible to determine the nature of the corporation that was on the socks. And besides the legal aspect that I will need to go to the internet page and directly asked for permission into the inquiry of the information. Basically, you know, he got like, you're going to have to talk to corporate. And I did email,

an email that I found for Exito. I have had no response. Huh. It seems unlikely that we're going to get an answer from Exito. So it feels like we're kind of stuck here, which had me and Alan both feeling some regret. regret because, you know, he had also gone back to his Reddit post because he hadn't looked at it when I first, you know, got in touch with them. I do have to apologize since I reviewed my posting on Reddit and I found out that I did took a photo.

I didn't document properly all of the back stuff on the foot and the corporation logo, which could point to where it was being made or other information. about it. So like if there was going to be company information on the back of the label around the socks, he doesn't have that. Yeah. Yeah. So Amory, I do have one more detail to share here. Ooh. Okay. It is something that Alan found on Spanish language websites, uh, Colombian websites, I believe. And I was able to find it as well. He posted his original post with the socks in 2024. Okay. Fruit of the Loom as a brand didn't have a presence in the country of Columbia, like was not selling its products there at all until 2025. Whoa. Okay. So it can't be legit Fruit of the Loom. No.

I mean, at this point, we kind of knew it wasn't. Yeah. And so let's recap a little bit here, right? What is the best theory of what actually happened here? Either my friend Alan, who doesn't want his full name divulged, who I've only met over Discord and, you know, audio calls. So best friends. Best friends. I really do like Alan, though, I have to say.

Either Alan is making this up. No. As somebody who's studying visual arts and, you know, is fairly online. Or there was a cornucopia logo in some fashion on these socks, right? And the photo is real. And now we just don't know how that happened. So let's like work our way through the second one.

How in your mind did this happen? So do you remember when we ran into marketing? Keese on our way back from Goodwill. And he looks up just the Fruit of the Loom logo because he doesn't believe us that there's no cornucopia in it. At this point, when you look it up online, the logo for Fruit of the Loom, the cornucopia comes up. It's competing with the actual logo. Absolutely.

It's so much so that Keese was like, wait a minute, I see both. So what are we doing here? And so I think someone who wanted to sell. something as Fruit of the Loom, I think they saw, oh, this is a way to sell Fruit of the Loom that will be recognizable to people, but is not actually the Fruit of the Loom logo. Okay. I think Alan agrees with you. I mean, I'm a very rational guy, so I just thought that maybe the people of the packaging

company, or maybe they repackage it here, or they have some kind of middle manager, where they just went lazy and picked up the first River Loom Corcorot logo on the internet. But I honestly didn't see any kind of another explanation. So I was trying to imagine the correct analogy for this, Amory. Mm-hmm.

Have you ever seen the original Ghostbusters movie? You know, I haven't. It's on the list. I know. Oh, I know. This is the conversation we always have. It's a straight classic. I know.

There's this part in the end of the movie where the Ghostbusters are in a Tet-a-Tet, if you will, with Gozer the Gozerian. Are you a God? Who you obviously don't know. This is an ancient godlike cosmic entity that is facing off against the Ghostbusters. No?

Ben. Gozer asks the Ghostbusters to choose the way in which all of humanity will meet its demise. No, it can't be. What is it? It can't be. What did you do, Ray? Oh, shit. And all they have to do is imagine the form in which their doom will arrive, and it will.

It's the stay puffed marshmallow man. So the stay buff marshmallow man comes to destroy all of humanity. And the Ghostbusters have to deal with that. But like, to me, that's like this example of like, This is manifesting, right? We're collectively summoning the cornucopia. We are thinking about it. We're talking about it on the internet.

And that brings it into the real world via somebody like copying and pasting the fake logo onto some socks that make it into like an exito bargain bin in Colombia. You know what I mean? We're manifesting. Yeah. Yeah. And the question from here is like,

I think it was a fast company article that at the end of it, They basically suggested, like, maybe Furn of a loom should just change their logo at this point to the cornucopia. But I don't think that's going to happen because at this point, they have to sort of stick to their guns around, no, if you see the cornucopia, that's not us. Yeah, and it's, you know, it's sort of, you know, it feels like somewhat of a letdown to not maybe solve the original mystery or to feel as though it's like unsolved, even though the, company has denied it. But not having a truly definitive answer on these socks and where they came from got Alan and I feeling a little more philosophical. And in this part of the conversation, we got to something that for me, at least, Amory, felt kind of satisfying. That's the paradox of memetics on popular culture. Do you grab something that maybe is fake or you, you, maybe is fake,

you invent something, but then the collective intelligence just repeats that same pattern so many times that it ends up just becoming part of a culture and by an extent real. So, Amory, I am getting comfortable now in this non-definitive space and appreciating that at the same time, you know, before we hung up, Alan had something else to say. It was about someone who is also from Columbia, an author and a journalist, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I do would like to leave you with some parting words. Absolutely. I do believe this interaction is very interesting because of all the places on earth,

for you to find this almost magical situation of not knowing if it's real or not, to be, in my country, Colombia, a place where it's famous for its magical realism. The literary current of blending the unknown with the mundane. I think it's a perfect example of it. I love that. Yeah, that's pretty good. It's pretty good, right? Yeah, that leaves me with.

a little like, well, we can't explain everything. So sometimes we just have to get comfortable in the things we can't explain. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was produced by Frannie Monaghan. It was co-hosted and reported by me, Amory Severson. And me, Ben Brock Johnson. It was edited by Dave Shaw, Mix and Sound Design by our Fruit of the Loom-tastic production manager, Paul Vicus. The rest of our team is Grace Tatter, Dean Russell, Emily Jankowski, and our senior managing producer, Summa Tijoshi. Big ups to Marquis, by the way, who we bumped into on the street. That was fun. Woo, woo, Marquis Neil.

Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between online communities and international counterfeiting operations that fuel conspiracy theories. If you have an untold history, an unsolved mystery, or some other wild story from the internet, you know what to do. Email us. Endless Thread. WBUR.org.