I’m with stupid?
Dr Neil Mulholland
‘…okay, so make yourselves comfortable. There’s coffee, Danish and sanitiser on there – help yourselves…’
The ante-room is an established brand of the postindustrial loft space, but gets away from the insane look of the old flagship CAD${STORE_NAME} by being more natural and realistic. There’s lots of distressed texturing and fine detailing here to create a cinematic look. Ceci n’est pas une retail store… it’s a threshold between utmost gravity and abysmal nothingness.
A sign on the ‘wall’ asks that we, respectfully, leave our cellphones outside, and refrain from wearing distracting clothing or jewellery. Another sign, placed on an easel close to the window reads: NO SHIRT, NO SHOES, NO SERVICE. I haven’t, I haven’t! Have I? This wasn’t mentioned in the emails. I really hope it doesn’t apply to me.
There’re some hushed murmurations among the invited pre-orderers:
‘Gyeah, it’s like a soft, colourful piece of cloth that you put on your upper body. (Makes a gentle, rustling sound with hands to mimic the feel of cloth.) Uh, but it’s different from what you might be used to. It’s a way to keep comfortable and sometimes look nice. It’s a bit like a cozy blanket, But guess what? You don’t use it to keep warm like a blanket. You put it on your upper body, like this! (Pretends to put something over their head.) HHHNNNNgggggg! So dope!’
Ha, a flashy coincidence, I mutter to myself.
My number is called. The door ajar. A very small entrance: like a cat flap. It’s pitch black inside. I can’t feel my way in so I shuffle around real slow until I can see that there’s something dangling way way back at the back racks. Nothing as such, as far as I can tell. It’s dimly spotlit from above so that it is the only thing visible in the otherwise featureless shop floor. It’s covered in a protective film, but even that’s barely noticeable. It has no other distinguishing features.
Before the inevitable foaming and crashing – silence. A contemplative pitch appears to emanate from what lies beneath the film; shimmering with an otherworldly aura. I try naming every hair standing on end on both of my arms. (No spoilers, but all the names bare a striking resemblance to the aforementioned coincidence.) An unusual signal hums at 327.57 MHz. Sharp intake of breath. I could swear I am being addressed directly. But I entered the sale room alone, and there’s no audible response from anyone. Not that I can tell if there’s anyone in here other than me. It’s way too dark.
I think I hear some flapping as something swoops in over my head. The air pressure doubles. Some fairground-style air-piston hydraulics to accompany the lighting system buzzing? Dolby Atmos floor tiles kicking-in? That’s just bad for it…. Subtle odours, unholy oracles, seep into my porous bones. (sawing noise) Teeth chase the breach.
Volatile zibets! The Wheel of Death begins to spin, causing the thoughts in my head to freeze momentarily. I’m not sure if this is part of it or not. Is it to buy time to look under the film? It feels like this lasts forever (when it’s done, let me know). I’d take some time out to check how my coin is doing, but I left my cellphone outside. My belly is rumbling now and my feet are tired. (BTW, I am totally against hunger.) I sit down on the freshly carpeted floor. It’s a total head-scratcher: ‘Ruh-roh, what’s going on here?’
Adversely impacted by executable jus-ju, the shop-floor mist grows murkier, unfolding and refolding into a 100% gangrenous indulgence. Then, thickening and hovering right there… all the cues I need: instantly. I know what’s going on and understand how I came to be where I am in this moment.
Fun pops of rethreaded ectoplasm skirt its vibrant trim. Look! They have a life effect of their own; oozy mutilated applique stamping its instant mindset onto every versatile wisp of ether. The heroic pops differ in each unique vapour, but these scintillating rivulets pose no danger to the overall co-ord vocab. Pulsating through the xylem, tense T shaped flashes fizz the most adulation among the stealthiest.
What don’t I notice? I don’t notice… Hindsight. Yeah. That slogan.
Eager to feel comfy and look cool, I inhale this magnificent creation’s inert vapours. At first, it feels really nice and soft, like a cozy gentle hug from someone you love. From my tum, a grumble comes. A murmur. Then, suddenly, the foul quavering tee clings tightly like a second skin, grinding its sharp-sets. As the xylem contracts around my ribcage, I feel the overwhelming compulsion to enact its slogan, obedient to its every command.
I stumble out of the CAD${STORE_NAME} into the sunny street. A total stranger is starting right at me, their big red face contorted with offence. A whining, frustrated mess: ‘You sick fuck, fuck you! Rot in hell you fuck!’ Normally I love it when someone is just all uncomfortable, and angry like this, but this is different. This is a potentially perilous situation. Confused and uncomfortable, I quicken my pace. Glancing sideways, I grab at my reflection in the department store’s window:
@£$% *&^, @£$%ING @£$%!
It’s a real moment of clarity. I’m completely unable to comprehend the malice of the garment’s frankly appalling message. How could I wear something so, so.., cruel and spiteful, so indifferent to the suffering of others? The vest’s condescending proteolytic enzymes gnaw at my belly. I claw at the xylem, but it’s futile – it has fused itself with my skin. I’m manic and start to blank out.
For each stranger that I encounter on my walk home, my chest unveils a new toxic slogan, each designed specifically cause the greatest personal offence. As days turn into weeks, my torso spins a relentless cycle of belittlement and cruelty. Now everyone I pass is triggered by my body’s hurtful taunts, and gets real upset. At first I tried to apologise, but, well, that just led to even more extreme provocations from my body-blanket. It truly is an entity beyond comprehension, a malevolence that defies all attempts at containment. The damage is done. The trail of discord has torn apart the fabric of my community. Families no longer on speaking terms, friendships shattered, all of my friends descended into madness. Terrifying.
I cause strife and division wherever I go, but I really feel like I am the only person who knows nothing about what it would really feel like to be on the receiving end of my T-shirt’s abuse. I don’t despair of this, because I know it’s all happening moment to moment and that, later, it will probably just come to me. The best thing is…, and this is something I don’t say lightly, the best thing really is realising that I have no perspective, no quarry of my own. To you that might seem irritating, messy. But what’s not to like?
What else? Mmmmm…. Well, the t-shirt needs recolouring IMO. Not that I care too much, but then again, not that I don’t care at all.
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The T-Shirt: Between Conformity and Transgression
Ben Ware
I.
In J.C. Flügel’s The Psychology of Clothes (1930), the author argues that the compulsion to wear clothes is ‘neurotic’ and ‘irrational’: the sign of a human inability ‘to allow ourselves an undistorted recognition of our bodies’. He concludes that the application of psychoanalytic principles to the minutiae of everyday life will ultimately lead to the rejection of clothing altogether. More advanced civilisations, he claims, will go naked, marvelling at the primitiveness of the clothing that they used to think was essential.
While this argument has a certain utopian appeal, it is, of course, entirely wrong. Our identity appears only at the moment it is fabricated. To become subjects in the world requires not only the acquisition of language, but also an ability to organise ourselves as clothed. From the moment we begin to select our own attire — that is, when we start to truly separate ourselves off from our parents or caregivers — we demonstrate to others that we are beings with a reservoir of needs and desires that demand to be satisfied, or at the very least acknowledged.
II.
Textile is first of all a text, into which is inserted the text of the living, breathing, human body. This double text demands to be read. But how, exactly? The humble T-shirt is a good place to begin.
The T-shirt is, in one respect, the most ordinary of commodities. A mass manufactured garment, which is both comfortable to wear and (luxury brand versions aside) usually affordable for working class people. In this respect, the T-shirt is democratic. Ironically, however, the history of the slogan T-shirt begins on the political right, rather than the left. The first slogan T-shirt was made for the 1948 presidential campaign of the then Republican candidate Thomas E. Dewey, where the T-shirt carried the somewhat underwhelming message “Dew It With Dewey.” Fast forward two decades, however, and the slogan T-shirt had become an essential activist tool: part of the campaigns of both the Anti War and Black Power movements.
It is in this radical tradition that the slogan T-shirt has, more or less, persisted through to the present day. In the 1970s, Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren turned punk into a canvas, producing countless provocative T-shirt’s, including one bearing the image of two cowboys with their genital’s touching – a Situationist-style critique of the macho culture of the 1950s and 1960s. In 1984, the designer Katherine Hamnett famously confronted the right-wing Conservative Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan: “58% DON’T WANT PERISHING” – a reference to public opposition to US nuclear missiles being stationed in Europe. In the late 1980s, artist Keith Haring worked with the grassroots AIDS coalition group, ACT UP, to produce a number of T-shirts to raise awareness of the epidemic. Haring combined ACT UP’s slogan “Ignorance = Fear”, with another that was altogether more shocking and powerful: “Silence = Death”. After a period of ironic decline in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the politically-charged slogan T-shirt has recently made a comeback. Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, and rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, the statement “I CAN’T BREATHE” began appearing on thousands of T-shirts from Minnesota to Melbourne.
But there is also a darker side. In a new cultural epoch dominated by the addiction-producing machine of social media, the enjoyment of causing offence (in order to gain popular attention) has become ubiquitous. In a TikTok video posted in May 2023, Ashton Ray (@ashray) showed a blue T-shirt with pink lettering bearing the slogan: “Black Lives Matter but first coffee.” The T-shirt’s deliberate provocation was, of course, to suggest that coffee – which has its own roots in racism and colonial exploitation – is more important than Black lives. Ray’s T-shirt is part of a new trend of reactionary (‘anti-woke’) slogan T-shirts, that work by overturning or undercutting an original subversive message (“Just Burn Oil”, “Support the Police: Defund the Left”). This is détournement in the era of contemporary ‘culture wars’; faux avant-gardism at its most depressing.
III.
Given the shipwreck of contemporary politics and the banality of much political sloganeering, it is perhaps now time to think again (in more philosophical and psychoanalytic terms) about the precise meaning of the slogan or statement T-shirt. What do such T-shirts communicate or attempt to communicate? Who are they actually worn for? And what anxieties do they attempt to negotiate?
The slogan T-shirt (like fashion more broadly) can of course be a form of revolt: a way of subverting existing social codes and conventions; a means of breaking with the established moral and political framework. At the same time, the wearers of slogan T-shirts (like those belonging to any subcultural formation) also lay down their own set of rules and laws, and find strict ways of policing them. The slogan T-shirt thus embodies the whole social dilemma of wanting to ‘stand out’ as a unique individual and at the same time wanting to ‘fit it’ as part of a wider group. It opens up the question of how one wants to be positioned within the social, symbolic order – that is, how one wants to be perceived by others, and fundamentally how one wants to be desired.
But this question of desire turns out to be a complicated one. The way that we clothe our bodies is often seen as an expression of our ‘true’ or ‘authentic’ self. But, as the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan points out, any idea of an ‘authentic’ self is really just a fiction. Our most intimate sense of self – what we take to be our ‘true desire’ – comes not from within, but from outside. It is a social product; or, as Lacan puts it, ‘the desire of the Other’. By this phrase, Lacan means two things: first, what we desire is the thing we suppose the Other to desire; and second, our desire is ultimately a desire for recognition from the Other (or group of Others). Thus the young man in the latest Supreme or Balenciaga T-shirt who believes that he is expressing his own ‘unique style’ is really doing nothing of the sort. Instead he is wearing his heart on his sleeve (or printed on his chest) and saying to the Other: desire me, love me, take away my anxiety by giving me the recognition I crave.
We appear to have entered an era of sinister tolerance: anyone can now say, do and wear whatever they like, as long as the day-to-day workings of capitalism are not interfered with. No one gets arrested anymore for wearing a T-shirt with A Tom of Finland image printed on the front; no one gets beaten up anymore for wearing the ‘wrong’ band T-shirt. Indeed, it’s now not uncommon to see toddlers in Nirvana and Wu Tang T-shirts, all for the narcissistic pleasure of their eternally nostalgic parents. At a time when the only prohibition is prohibition itself, in a world where (almost) anything goes, what place, then, the slogan T-shirt? We might suggest two final answers. First, we need to recall the power of language and come up with new and better slogans. As the philosopher Louis Althusser reminds us: “words are weapons, explosives or tranquilizers and even poisons”; our future political struggles will still be determined by the struggle over words. Second, if the right words still elude us and our current catastrophic times prevent us from moving beyond the old clichés, perhaps we need to repeat an old modernist move: fade to black and begin again. As Malevich puts it in one of his manifestoes: ‘it is from zero, in zero, that the true movement of being begins’. And maybe this is still the real connection between art and politics today: art must reduce us to nothing (a new zero level) so that we might emerge from the wreckage transformed, unrecognizable to ourselves, speaking a new language, chanting new slogans.
Ben Ware is Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Art at King’s College London. He is the author of Dialectic of the Ladder: Wittgenstein, the “Tractatus” and Modernism (Bloomsbury); Living Wrong Life Rightly: Modernism, Ethics and the Political Imagination (Palgrave); and On Extinction: Beginning Again at the End (Verso). He is also editor of the collection Francis Bacon: Painting, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (Thames & Hudson). His recent writings have appeared in e-flux journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, and New Formations.
Band T-shirts
Sarah Waterhouse
I’m pretty sure everyone has at least one knocking about in their wardrobe, but have you ever thought about where band T-shirts began?
The simple T-shirt itself started its journey to the mainstream by evolving from underwear. In the 19th century, one piece undergarments called ‘Union Suits’ were cut into separate top and bottom items of clothing, with the top being long enough to tuck into the bottom. They were adopted by miners as a way to stay cool in the hot working environment.
Ultimately the top half of this became an undershirt to be worn under uniform and very quickly became popular as a layer of clothing for workers in multiple industries, due to the garments being easy to clean and inexpensive. Initially used by the U.S. Navy, it became usual practice for the men to remove their uniform jacket at work parties or tropical climates, meaning they were only wearing the undershirt. For similar easy clean and cost effective reasons they then became popular among young boys, being made in various colours and patterns. These were first called ‘T-shirts’ around the 1920s.
Following World War II, the popularity amongst Navy men remained and it became increasingly common to see them wearing uniform trousers with the T-shirts as casual clothing. T-shirts remained a staple garment to be worn by individuals when carrying out laborious work due to the lightweight fabric, but took off in a big way in the 50s and 60s as outerwear. Influenced in the 50s by idols at the time such as Marlon Brando wearing a T-shirt as a stand alone item of clothing in A Streetcar Named Desire, a new fashionable status and era was achieved by the modest T-shirt, no longer worn as an undershirt but the focus of the outfit.
Around the same time, T-shirts with resort names and characters were printed by numerous companies in Miami, along with the development of the still common ‘ringer’ T-shirts which consist of a block colour shirt with a contrasting collar and sleeve band (I’m sure we all remember the Topman variation of these with the buttons! Sorry for any PTSD that may have caused anyone). The increased choice and ability for individuality meant that a relatively cheap item of clothing worn as a way to keep cool could now be worn as a way to look cool.
In the 60s, printed T-shirts took off as a form of self expression. Developments in screen printing led by artists such as Andy Warhol and artist and inventor Michael Vasilantone who developed the most popular garment printing machine (even now!) meant T-shirts could be more creative than ever before, with printed T-shirts also becoming popular for advertisements and protest. Brands identified the increased popularity in printed T-shirts and used them as a form of marketing, placing their logo on a T-shirt to reach a larger audience and keep themselves in the forefront of the public’s mind.
Now firmly no longer viewed as an undergarment, with the new-found ability to wear clothing which demonstrated your political beliefs or even what brands you used or were into enough to advertise on your chest (and pay for the privilege!) T-shirts were a way for young people to show who they were, what they were into, and what they stood for.
It makes sense then that this was eventually capitalised on by the entertainment industry. The first concert T-shirts can be dated back to the 50s again with an Elvis Presley fan club creating them, but the idea didn’t really become much of anything until promoter Bill Graham really focused on this form of promotion by selling T-shirts of bands such as Jefferson Airplane in the 60s. He actually co-founded Winterland Productions, who are credited as the first concert T-shirt manufacturing company.
The 70’s would be the time typically regarded as band T-shirts really taking off. AC/DC had the first worldwide tour that made more merchandise than ticket sales and many other bands from around the same time experienced a similar increase in income revenue. If you’ve got an authentic vintage T-shirt from a big concert held around this time you may well be quids in as some go for a lot of money nowadays as memorabilia. An easy form of advertising, T-shirts with concert dates on the back were and still are popular – much like with the brand logo T-shirts, fans could pay to advertise their favourite band’s latest tour, and feel cool doing it!
Fans loved it, and continued to buy the T-shirts with each new release/tour, resulting in a near enough win/win situation for both band and fan. For the band themselves (and the promoter /manager), it means another source of income and promotion of the band (again hopefully leading to more income). In 2021 it was found that on average music artists make 16 times more in gross merchandise sales per show than in a year’s worth of streaming royalties! (source: atVenu 2021 Year in Review).
To the wearer they are a form of self expression – ‘I wear this band T-shirt therefore I have these beliefs and ideals’, a way of fitting in – ‘this is a popular band I’ll look like part of something through wearing this’, a way of standing out – ‘nobody’s heard of this band I’ll look ahead of the curve wearing this’. Clothing in general is a major form of self expression, so the ability to combine this with displaying your music taste, arguably a massive part of what makes someone themselves? Ideal!
This also tied in with the still popular use of T-shirts as a political statement – musicians were becoming increasingly vocal about their own views and what they stood for, so to wear a band’s T-shirt meant you were aligning yourself with their views and became another way to reveal parts of your identity to the world. This was brought to the forefront in the 80’s by the rise of punk, with the combination of punk bands performing in underground clubs singing (or shouting?) about anti-capitalism, and punk ideology adopters using clothing as a way to reinforce the anarchist message by individualising it further with rips, safety pins and other assorted items. To market T-shirts purely for material gain would be rather anti-punk one would argue, so bands of this time opted for more inventive, individualistic merchandise – limited edition but still affordable. Taken and ran with by Vivienne Westwood, rather than put the band T-shirt popularity on hold she turned them into an even larger statement for an individual to wear, including anarchic slogans on them with an all round sense of ‘fuck you’.
Johnny Rotten (or John Lydon as he was at the time!) became part of Sex Pistols largely down to a band T-shirt – a Pink Floyd one he was wearing at the time of meeting the rest of the band, which he had altered by scrawling ‘I hate’ above the band name and scratching out the eyes on the photo of the band members. Along with some trademark punk safety pins thrown in, this form of expression solidified that he was ‘it’, a good representative of the anarchist mentality that drove the Sex Pistols (at least at the start!)
In the usual societal cycle, the anarchist mentality that became popular throughout the 80’s subdued somewhat, and band T-shirts again adapted with the times. The evolution of music media meant that people had increased access to their favourite musicians, and to tap into all that could offer you needed to effectively have a ‘brand’ that fans could buy into, with the band’s logo very much being part of that. Metal bands using satanic symbols in their branding for example easily identified to fans what type of music, ideals and ‘brand’ to expect, and to have an easily identifiable logo that looked good enough for people to want to wear and advertise that brand was increasingly important.
The rise of the high street and online shopping has aided in band T-shirts now being commercialised to the nth degree, with every other high street clothing shop offering a plethora of T-shirts with notable band logos such as Kiss, Rolling Stones, Joy Division, and Johnny Rotten’s beloved Pink Floyd to name a few. You couldn’t move in your local Topshop at their peak without knocking into a band T-shirt, and remember that River Island Rihanna one that was everywhere and on everyone?
The ‘name three songs’ gimmick of asking someone wearing a band T-shirt if they even know any of that band’s music is as a result of these T-shirts being so mainstream – you used to have to have attended a concert (or at least know someone who had) to obtain these T-shirts, you don’t even have to be one of their monthly listeners on Spotify now to be able to walk around with the bands logo proudly emblazoned across your chest. Still a very important form of revenue and advertising, the band T-shirt has arguably now got very little to do with the band’s music and much more to do with the aesthetic. For a time there was even a short spike in popularity of ‘spliced’ band T-shirts, allowing you to wear half of two different band’s logos at the same time, with the bands not even necessarily having any relation to each other other than their logos looked aesthetically pleasing mashed together in an either contrasting or complementary way.
Putting the band’s logo on a T-shirt still allows for increased recognition of the band and their brand – I’m pretty sure I knew of the Rolling Stones iconic lips and tongue logo before I’d even knowingly heard any of their music (I had the shirt, customised it by cutting the sleeves off and cropping it, and I may have struggled as 14 year old me to name 3 songs!)
Whatever the reason for an individual wearing one, be it to support their new favourite band who ‘are sure to blow up soon and I knew them and supported them from the start’, to symbolise to the world who you are as a person based on your music taste, or simply because you think it looked nice and hey we’ve all got to wear clothes why not this cool looking top, band T-shirts are most definitely here to stay and have solidified themselves as a staple form of income for bands, and a way for fans to show their dedication (or the opposite if you’re wearing it a là Lydon!)