Would you buy MIA’s $100 tin foil hat?

Are you tired of people laughing at your homemade tin foil hat when you pop out to stock up on cans of beans? Well, don’t worry, MIA has you covered. Literally. She’s just launched a range of streetwear for the doomsday prepper who also wants to look good.

Under the brand name Ohmni, items on offer include “the tin foil hat you’ve been waiting for” (a silver bucket hat with copper lining), a “full shield” t-shirt, a “full protection poncho”, “potency jeans” (just the crotch area protected, to stop 5G making you infertile), “potency boxer shorts” (just to be extra sure), and a “data protection” bag.

That ensemble will set you back $950. And that’s before you’ve got a data blocking phone case to allow you to go off grid at any moment. I’m joking, of course. The back pocket of the jeans is lined with a faraday cage, so you don’t need to buy the phone case.

“Ohmni is your last frontier at preserving your privacy, autonomy, and rights over your body and your data”, says MIA on the website for the brand. “This is not your [average] artist foray into fashion. This is a necessity”.

“Future backwards is R U TUF”, she adds incorrectly. “If the conspiracy theorists are wrong, good for you, you own some beautiful clothes made with pure silver and precious metals. But, if they are right, you just might have saved the future of humanity. Welcome to Ohmni. I could be a genius, I could be a cheat”.

Those are the only two options, apparently. Genius or cheat. Although I reckon it could also be both. Or neither. Who knows? I guess the question is, does MIA actually believe that her new clothing line is essential to humanity or has she just identified an underserved emerging market to cash in on?

It’s insisted on the online shop selling the goods that these things will do the job of providing protection from all the invisible forces bouncing around in the air. That copper lining, it promises, will deflect “electromagnetic waves such as wi-fi and 5G with up to 99.999% shielding effectiveness”.

The words “up to” are possibly doing a lot of heavy lifting there. But it is certainly the case the MIA has outed herself as a bit of a conspiracy theorist in the past. Before the pandemic was even a glint in our throat swabs, throughout 2019 she was tweeting about her concerns. At one point she claimed that 5G was going to turn us all into “radioactive cyborgs” within a decade.

Once COVID-19 began to take hold, she did draw links between the virus and the new mobile communication technology. In March 2020 she tweeted, “Last pandemic came with radio waves. Now 5G”. Commercial radio broadcasting only really took off after the end of the Spanish flu pandemic and had been used in shipping since the early 1900s, but whatever. I’m not sure now is the time to start fact checking this stuff.

MIA’s missives on the matter have lessened since 2020, but it seems reasonable to assume that she’s still serious about this stuff. If she doesn’t genuinely believe that high fashion protection from electromagnetic waves are necessary, then this was an incredibly long set up to a weird joke. Although that is also possible, I guess.

Anyway, let’s take it at face value and just for a minute assume that these garments and accessories are indeed “a necessity”. Can they really block 5G, wi-fi and all that bad stuff?

There is lots of information out there to say that copper is indeed the most effective way to block radio frequencies - many of them from sources not extolling ways to stop them from getting into your brain (or balls). Although I also found claims to the counter. The Ohmni website also links to several studies on the effects of electromagnetic fields on the human body, but it’s hard to determine exactly how authoritative they really are.

Let down by science, I turned to the next obvious source of information: TikTok. Specifically MIA’s TikTok profile, where she has been frantically sharing posts about Ohmni this week.

One video shows someone testing out the “anti trace phone case”. It demonstrates the phone losing its data connection when placed in the bag, only to reconnect when removed again. So that seems to prove that it does indeed cut your phone off from the internet. Although if you want to be off grid, should you really have a phone in the first place?

Another video was less impressive. And not just because it features Diplo. Although it does. It sees the producer sitting in an armchair wearing a “brain protection durag” ($100) with the caption “testing to see if he is feeling better when he is not controlled”.

It’s hard to reach a conclusion on that, because all that happens is that Diplo makes some weird humming noises. “He seemed pretty happy”, the caption judges. The video does not show how happy Diplo was with his head uncovered.

In the end, I’ve decided I’m probably not going to fork out for any of these things - even if I ignore the conspiracy theory stuff and just focus on owning “some beautiful clothes”. I do need some new trousers, but I just don’t think silver’s my colour.

Also, I really don’t want to cut myself off from the internet. If I did, I wouldn’t be able to find this and other amusing music news stories to put in this column. Who am I without that? I’m just not prepared to consider the existential questions this clothing throws up. So, here you go, some more news that raised a smile this week…