T-shirt Nation: Legible clothing and why we make and wear it.     By Dave Kim I was eight when I made my first T-shirt. I took a new Hanes T out of my dresser and wrote "TMNT" on it in with a Magic Marker. The letters stood for "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles," who everyone remembers were the shit in 1989, and not having one of their T-shirts could get you blacklisted from the playground. Alas, my religious mother refused to buy me clothes that featured mutant turtle men, righteous or not, wielding pizzas and Japanese combat weapons. I had to take fashion matters into my own hands. The process was harder than I thought it'd be. The ink seeped through to the carpet, my bubble "M" was just a fat green square, and the whole thing fanned out to one side like a cheesy ClipArt banner. Bizarrely, the shirt was a big hit at school the next day. I'd made it to blend in, but got all this attention for having the gusto to tag up my clothes. Since then, I've made only a few memorable T's. One, "White Male," I wore to a Halloween soiree in college, thinking I was oh-so-edgy since I'm Asian and thought pseudo-racist irony would be a real party starter. Two, "Festivus Yes / Bagels No," referenced a Seinfeld episode and is no longer funny nor relevant, too old and mainstream to be hip, too recent to be throwback. And three, "Smell the Glove," a hats-off to the deadbeat dad of mockumentaries, This is Spinal Tap, mostly drew shrugs or feminist criticism. None of these shirts were very popular. But recently, inspired by artsy friends and do-it-yourself TV, I've resolved to make more. There's something satisfying in writing on a clean T-shirt, something hinging on taboo, the marking of territory. It's like peeing your initials in snow, carving your name on a barstool, writing "VOID" on someone else's check. So I comb lower Manhattan one afternoon and bring home the popular Speedball screen printing kit ($46.71), deciding an upgrade from Magic Marker couture is long overdue. There are multiple ways to make T-shirts but paper-stencil printing, according to the manual, is the easy method for shaky-handed, generally clueless people like me. I'll have to cut my design in a piece of paper, line it up on the shirt, press the screen on top of it, and spread the paint evenly across the surface. Pretty straightforward. Then, in a real Captain Obvious moment, after all the materials are ready to go in front of me, I remember that the backbone of a custom T-shirt is a good idea, not professional art supplies. I've got dick for inspiration. The best I can come up with is "Suspicious Pancake," prompted by my friend's misreading of "suspicious package." I'm furious with myself. When did I get so uncreative? I can't just print anything—a personalized T-shirt is supposed to be a window to the soul, a sliver of imagination registered onto fabric, a preshrunk signifier of the self. It's supposed to give its wearer meaning, or at least a semblance of it, however goofy or wrought with irony. Like a caption that invites analysis. And all I have is Suspicious Pancake? Shamefully, I start to cut the letters. * What is it about T-shirts anyway? There's a guy in San Francisco named Dan Rollman, advertising copywriter by day, artist and textile Confucian by night and weekend, who's applied his T-shirt-making skills to modifying existing art. Filching photographs from various print publications, he "clothes" rockers and anonymous models in white T-shirt cutouts—like a sly kid prank-dressing his sister's paper dolls. The "shirts" sport clever messages written in Rollman's crisp, unassuming handscript, serving as captions for their respective photos. A woman holding her cat by the scruff of the neck is dubbed a "Mean Ventriloquist." BeyoncÈ, in a hotshot concert pose, has "Beyoncé It, Don't Spray It" written across her chest. (Check out www.snerko.com for more mischief.) But the real fun of his work comes through in person. Rollman makes life-size T-shirts at his gallery shows, which are really character studies masquerading as art openings. You line up to meet the artist—an absurdly tall, scraggly-looking guy sitting at a table with stacks of white T's and a Sharpie—and talk to him for a few minutes when it's your turn. You might discuss politics, gay Irish pirates, and everything else in the universe before Rollman grabs a shirt and writes you a personalized message. Photographer and collaborator Michael Kennedy takes digital pictures of everyone in their new T's, prints them, and voila—they have portraits for the empty frames hanging on the walls. "My favorite part of the process is seeing someone's reaction when I give them their shirt," says Rollman. "I'm always a little nervous seeing how people will react. I've seen emotions ranging from laughter to shock to an outburst of tears." Cheeky to profound, the one-liners have a certain candidness to them, revealing hidden truths, exaggerations maybe, that point out a detail or two about the wearer. They're elements underneath—fragments of personality, misspoken soundbytes—turned into words and displayed on the outside. An underlayer later donned over the street clothes worn to the opening. It's all a bit subversive if we remember that T-shirts were considered underwear when they were introduced in the States. During World War I, American soldiers saw French and German troops wearing comfortable white cotton shirts under their uniforms. The doughboys shed their wool long-sleeves and brought the European garments back home, wearing them under work shirts to collect sweat. Then, partly as an act of rebellion and sexual freedom, people started wearing their undershirts freely. Actors in the 50's popularized the T-shirt and iconic images were forged: James Dean's rebellious-without-a-cause white T, Jean Seberg's tight, literati-stroking New York Herald Tribune shirt in Breathless, and Marlon Brando's T (drenched and torn apart) in A Streetcar Named Desire. The revolution charged ahead. When tie-dye came in vogue a decade or so later, the psychadelic, do-it-yourself shirt epitomized a way of life, outfitted a whole zeitgeist. A T-shirt could be a simple, unpretentious way to say, "I'm wearing what I believe in and it didn't cost me a fortune for some famous company to make it." Understanding why we wear T-shirts, then, might give us some insight to why we make them. The number one reason why people wear T-shirts now, according to a recent Jerzees survey, is comfort. That explains the light cotton fabric, the stretchy collars, but not the popularity of T-shirt graphics, messages, and brands. In the 80's and 90's, people shelled out serious dough for T's that advertised big business, sporting giant Tommy Hilfiger logos or telling the world that they were "too busy to fcuk." Writer-historian Paul Fussell once wrote that legible clothing allows wearers to feel important, to associate with something the world says is successful. "You fuse your private identity," he claims in his book, Class, "with external commercial success, redeeming your insignificance and becoming, for the moment, somebody." Only Class was written in 1983 and Fussell is an 81-year-old curmudgeon no one under 40 listens to anymore. Times, if you'll forgive the platitude, have changed. In a recent BBC article, a French Connection spokesperson commented that people don't buy clothes advertising big brand names anymore, that they're "very much not the market anymore." No urban fashionite would be caught dead sporting a palm-sized GAP logo now. Instead, today's legible shirts remind us that "vegetarians are eating the rainforest," that "Jesus is my homeboy," that "Chester A. Arthur is totally awesome." Or they attach one-worders like "juicy" or "emotastic" to their consumers. No, it's not the image of commercial success we crave these days, but a cheaper, less tyrannical, and deliciously indirect alternative: irony. We threaten the mundane with more mundane. We want badly and try hard to look as uninterested as possible, just to agonize those who are. We seek out elements of the universe that are so god-awful (Atari graphics, Burt Reynolds' movies) the world isn't complete without them. Chipping away at humdrum perfection, irony, to us, is criticism soufflÈd with humor. Maybe that's the rub: we wear T-shirts, whether advertising motor oil or Miami Vice to be funny. They're not just comfortable, as the Jerzees survey reports, but comforting; they reassure and hearten us with their smarminess. Plus, wearing a T-shirt is inherently humorous, right? It's so basic, so effortless. It's saying the most you can manage that day is a T-shaped piece of fabric that's usually two sizes too small or four sizes too big. That's sort of funny. Well, not really. Anyone can skip into a streetwear boutique, grab a "Respect the Mullet" T-shirt, and pretend to be the hippest sonofabitch at his community college. It's someone else's idea; the person wearing it is just wearing it. Even shirts with the cheekiest lines can't shake their attachment to a higher power, a brand, an institution, a snide designer. So we find ourselves back at Fussell's buzz-kill argument, only we're substituting success for humor. You're not funny. You can only appreciate funny, associate yourself with funny, attempt to fuse your identity with external funny. * What is amusing, though, is a T-shirt you design yourself, one that looks like garbage because you (A) have no artistic capabilities, (B) made it in your parents' den with a hand iron and a bottle of Red Stripe, and (C) burned a pretty brown triangle in it while pressing on the letters. You could scribble the stupidest message on it and people will still like you, stand next to you on the subway even, because original slogans carry the insolence of autonomy and are always funny—even when they're not. The solution to Fussell, it seems, lies in making your own legible clothing, associating yourself with a word or design or esoteric nugget that belongs to you. You are your own success1. Making shirts also conveniently falls in line with the country's do-it-yourself obsessions, which are fueled by the shopper's relapse from postmodern pop art and brand collage to sleek, modernist blanks. We buy unmarked canvases, pimp our stock rides, trade spaces for one-of-a-kind cribs, even queer-eye and customize our significant others, because putting our own flair on our stuff legitimizes it, reasserts the imaginations we developed long ago making popsicle-stick picture frames and Crayola opuses to hang on the family fridge. And in doing so, we're better than the poor sap who thinks the act of choosing, picking out one Ikea curtain over another, is inherently creative. If we're going to spend millions of dollars on hording cool shit, it might as well be unique and self-referential. It's still materialism, but at least it's custom-made materialism. Disgusted by conspicuous logos taking up ad space on our chests, we now go to stores that sell monochrome, unmarked clothes that just beg for add-ons. Plenty of outlets like Ready Made magazine, which more than one person has called "the Martha Stewart for urban hipsters," cater to young, artsy-fartsy DIY enthusiasts. We've been trekking to Goodwill (and painfully overpriced vintage joints) for years now, fighting for houndstooth pants and turquoise sweaters, hoping to turn them into throwback masterworks. And how liberating! How revolutionary! To buy an ugly sweater from Salvation Army and cut off the collar, put buttons on it, shear off the sleeves, splatter paint on it, rip it to shreds and sew the patches back together—basically, destroy the article and reconstruct it. But wearing a T-shirt, even if we've written all over it, isn't really a pure act of individualism. We can't show the world how incredibly unique we are because, at the end of the day, it's still a T-shirt. One of the most mundane, mass-produced, never-out-fashion articles of clothing on the market. They've all got labels on the collar, ones that say Hanes, American Apparel, Fruit of the Loom, labels that impose and cause that maddening, unscratchable itch on our napes. If we really wanted to be out there, we'd have to make the canvas ourselves or wear stuff that strikes up the sartorial disconnect one feels when seeing, say, a Caucasian wearing an Islamic caftan or a nerdy news reporter in a flak jacket. When all is said and done, we wear T-shirts to establish a niche. When we go out in public with our self-made legible T's, we're really doing it for those who will see them. We want to find others like us, people who will say "awesome shirt," which we'll read as, "I agree with your message, I approve of your aesthetic, or I identify with your humor," and forge an unspoken solidarity. Even when we wear slogans that purposely shock or offend, we're secretly looking for the few that appreciate the humor in misanthropic sentiment, the Dadaist bastards of the world. And since our identities are constantly dropping certain traits or adapting new ones, the always-in-style, cheap, and expendable T-shirt is the perfect medium. We wear them consciously but with the notion that they're temporal, like haircuts. They change as we shift our moods, exchange old friends for new, and mature. "It's kind of like wine," says Rollman, who now takes the fit and cut of T-shirts more seriously. "You drink it to get drunk when you're young, then you begin appreciating its finer points as you get older." Like drinking for drinking's sake, we make T-shirts to make T-shirts. Sure, we put into being an idea we had once that says something about our personalities, but it's not some grandiose summary of our deep inner selves, a symbol of subservience or identification with some higher institution. Even our most politically charged T's don't sum up the full spectrum of our lives. They're insights, ideas that were important enough to us at the time to warrant production. The process of making the shirt, of putting an idea into fruition, is in its own right satisfying. So there's a sense of revolution, albeit a mild one, attached to wearing a self-made T-shirt in that it invokes its origins, its creation, whereas the store-bought T-shirt functions in the present tense, after a purchase2. And as we make them through the years, they show the shifting methods of T-shirt-making itself, the kits we chose or had available to us, the color schemes, the thought process, the passing trends. It's the paradox of writing words that distinguish us from everybody else on a medium that, by itself, makes us look like everybody else. Suddenly we're back to irony. * When I've finished cutting the letters, I center the stencil on the front of the T-shirt about five or six inches below the collar. The 10" x 14" screen goes on top of everything, long-ways, fabric-side down, sandwiching the paper stencil between polyester and cotton. I like the swishy feel of the screen, its taut filaments velvety to the touch, stretched across a wooden frame branded with the word "Speedball" and a floppy "S" logo. Resting the top beam on the shirt, I angle the screen and daub it with yellow fabric paint. It's thick and uncooperative, clinging to the fibers in isolated spots until I squeegee all of it forward in what the manual calls a flood stroke. The screen absorbs a surprising amount and I have to pour more paint on it, some of which inevitably splatters onto the shirt. The perfectionist in me cringes. The flood stroke evens out the paint across the screen, filling all the microscopic pockets between the filaments. When I've evenly coated enough area to fit my letters, I press the screen flat and slowly pull the squeegee back toward me in a print stroke. This time, the rubber blade is angled so that it pushes the paint through the screen as it passes, through the open cutouts in the paper stencil, and onto the T-shirt. The paint is buttery and compliant on the way back, making hundreds of satisfying popping sounds as it squeezes through the lacework. Something tells me to repeat the process once more for good measure, but I've got the patience of six-year-old. I hold my breath and lift up the screen and the stencil. Not bad. It's hazy but readable, and I like the faint yellow lines where the paint bled over the stencil's edges. I press the screen flat, dab on some more paint, and squeegee away, hoping to thicken the letters a bit. This time, the letters come out clear but I've placed the stencil a half-inch too low on the shirt. It looks like one of those headache-inducing stereogram T-shirts (circa 1990), the ones that rode on the popularity of Magic-Eye books and boasted clever phrases like, "If you can read this you're not drunk enough." But I'm happy. Tomorrow I'm going to wear it all day with my chest puffed out like an old-school gangster. I'm going to smile when passersby squint their eyes at the shirt and look up at me, hunting for an, "aha." One or two will scratch their heads and ask, "what the hell is Suspicious Pancake?" I'll wonder the same thing. 1 But wait, big companies are making shirts now that look like some drunk guy made them in his garage. How do you know which are custom-made and which are store-bought? What if you admire someone for sporting a hilarious, seemingly original slogan, only to see the same shirt at a retail outlet an hour later? Damn you, corporate fashion! Must you appropriate everything? (back to story) 2 There are, of course, stores that sell intricate, hand-sewn, hand-drawn, one-of-a-kind, absurdly designed shirts that invoke their production processes. But they¼re the uncommon, and usually expensive, exceptions. (back to story)