Saturday, November 27, 2010

The Belaboured Shirt by American Apparel

Let's take a poll: these tees that require explanation, they be good or bad? I'm referring to the ones that hinge on a pun or related wordplay, like taking some familiar expression and making it literal, with art. I can't decide whether they're smug and "ironic" and something else like that, or novel and "witty" and something else like that.

Is the point to encourage cute strangers to walk up, study your shirt, you say "Get it? They're communists who party," and they get it, with a drawn-out vowel sound as proof, and you two hit it off and spend the rest of the night trading anecdotes on the porch, and by next August you're engaged!...? Or is it more to confuse the elderly?

Both? Aaaaaaaaaaaaaa. To the phones!


"Disc Jockey" 


"The i in TEAM"


"Medium Difficulty"


"Hypotamoose"


"Steven Seagull"

I have an idea for a convention where guests wander around in t-shirts, taste-testing to see if they can get the joke without reading the tags on the back. The Teexpo.1 Anyway, no disrespect to the fine designers of t-shirts around the world, who are far handier with Illustrator and one of them pen-mouse things than I'll ever (care to) be. Also, these are just tees, and it's not even summertime. Chill, sweater, chill.

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1 This, of course, is a real thing: teexpo.com. They seem to sell Greenpeace shirts, which, hey, cool, whatever. From their "About" page:
This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many pages like this one or sub-pages as you like and manage all of your content inside of WordPress.
Nice.

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