Hello, hello!
I’m on hyperdrive writing this piece of research, Slogan T-shirts are steroids for my quiet soul, ergo, this article may get over-punctuated with exclamations. I’ll try keep the excitement polite.
Shall we …?
It wasn’t until 1920 that the standard undershirt was monikered ‘T-shirt’ by F. Scott Fitzgerald in his novel, This Side of Paradise. It was Marlon Brando and James Dean who popularized the inner garment as outer-wear in their movies - A Streetcar Named Desire (1950) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Out in the open (pun intended), the T-shirt transformed into an empty canvas alluring graffiti artists, brands, campaigners, protestors, and music bands; basically any and everyone looking for a medium to advertise their voice or product.
Slogan T-shirts are wearable billboards of sorts, disregarding fits and fashion clichés to brazenly convey a message, a mood or solidarity. Although powerful slogans like ‘Black Lives Matter’ are effective even when hand-scripted on the humble tee, typography contributes to making messages recognizable and memorable. Remember the ‘I heart NY’ slogan?
Probably the earliest example of a slogan T-shirt was Republican candidate Thomas E. Dewey’s political campaign “Dew it with Dewey”.
Although the nominee didn’t quite ‘dew it’ at the 1948 US presidential elections - he lost in a major upset to Harry Truman - a precedent was set by using a T-shirt for a textual political campaign.
In the 1960s screen printing had achieved mass accessibility - it was easy to custom print your art - and as the 70s rolled in, the technique uninhibitedly imprinted the decade’s cultural scene onto the simple T-shaped garment. Music bands, and propaganda and protest movements, and political activism expressed themselves aloud (and quite creatively) on that piece of basic wear, prompting The New York Times to tag slogan tees as ‘the medium for the message’ in 1973.
During the same decade, tourism campaigning hopped on ingeniously. The advertising changed from attractive images of destinations to "I WENT TO_____ AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT." Do you have that one?
Most brilliant (and successful) ideas surprise with how ordinarily simple they are! In 1976 graphic designer Milton Glaser created New York State’s official slogan ‘I heart NY’ on a scrap of paper sitting in the back of a taxi.
The crayon scrawl is preserved in the Museum of Modern Art, Manhattan. Glaser added the words ‘MORE THAN EVER’ and a wounded heart to the original slogan following the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001.
In 1984, label owner Paul Morley of ZTT Records created the ‘FRANKIE SAY RELAX’ slogan tee following the release of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s debut album ‘Welcome to the Pleasuredome’.
The large black typeface on white T-shirts referenced the band’s infamous song ‘Relax’ from the same album. The lyrics are pretty suggestive about … er … restraint, which made BBC ban the song in the same year on all its tele and radio-casts. BBC’s ‘restrain’ obviously hyped the already popular slogan tee. Derivatives and imitations of those three words are still recreated on T-shirts, reminiscent of vintage vibes and the risqué song. Those who know, know.
Fashion too voiced its opinion uninhibitedly. Why wouldn’t it? The 80s were about big ideas and aspirations, power dressing, pop, gender fluidity, AIDS, looming nuclear fear … Do you recollect Wham! urging their fans to ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’ in extra large ‘CHOOSE LIFE’ tees?
In 1983 British fashion designer Katherine Hamnett created her first slogan tee - a first for the fashion industry. Borrowing from the core principles of Buddhism, she propagated ‘CHOOSE LIFE’ in large, bold fonts on oversized T-shirts, advocating anti-suicide and anti-drugs sentiments. "Slogan T-shirts are designed to put ideas in your brain. You can’t not read them. They make you think, and hopefully do the right thing.”
In 1984, Hamnett unnerved British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher with her anti-nuclear protest when she attended an event hosted by the leader wearing a T-shirt that brandished ‘58% DON’T WANT PERSHING’ - a protest against US Nuclear missiles proliferating across Europe, and thereby, a blatant protest against Thatcher. “I realized it was an incredible photo opportunity, whatever I thought of her. So I knocked up that T-shirt a couple of hours before the event.” Katherine Hamnett T-shirts continue to voice her opinions; the fashion house reopened in 2017 carrying ‘CANCEL BREXIT’ T-shirts on its racks.
All through her fashion career, rebel designer Dame Vivienne Westwood spiked a rather tame fashion scene with revolutionary punk and climate activism. She used the catwalk to propagate her Climate Revolution banner, contradictorily urging her consumers to ‘BUY LESS, CHOOSE WELL’. Her 2019 collection T-shirts told us ‘WE SOLD OUR SOUL FOR CONSUMPTION’.
In 2005, shortly after the shooting of an innocent man in London, Westwood created one of her most iconic slogan tees - a hard ‘I AM NOT A TERRORIST, PLEASE DON’T ARREST ME’ scribbled around a crayoned red heart.
But fashion isn’t always up in arms, it talk funny too. For his 2006 collection, Henry Holland created ‘Fashion Groupie’ T-shirts with rhyming slogans that mocked good-humoredly at the fashion industry.
‘I’LL SHOW YOU WHO’S BOSS, KATE MOSS’, ‘DO ME DAILY CHRISTOPHER BAILEY’, and ‘CAUSE ME PAIN HEDI SLIMANE’ have become synonymous with the multi faceted designer. Ten years later he recreated the jocular collection with 22 new scripted tees like ‘LET’S BREED BELLA HADID’ and ‘I’M YOURS FOR A TENNER KENDALL JENNER’. Although the Fashion Groupie collection catapulted Holland’s fashion design career manoeuvring it through a whirlwind success, the House of Holland downed its shutters in 2020. But not before the unorthodox T-shirts had marked the designer on the fashion starmap.
At the 2019 Paris Fashion Week, Dior had their first model sashay down the catwalk wearing an unglamorous white t-shirt embellished with a bold ‘SISTERHOOD IS GLOBAL’ statement.
The strong feminist sentiment emoted by the historic fashion house echoed Creative Director Maria Grazia Chiuri’s debut collection for Spring 2017, where Chiuri had dressed a model in a basic white tee that stated, ‘WE SHOULD ALL BE FEMINISTS’, and an extravagantly embroidered tulle skirt. It had created much fashion chatter. That slogan introduced Chiuri as Dior’s ‘first female creative director’; and since taking the helm, Chiuri continues to portray feminism and the Dior woman in a new light.
Pulling out another Katherine Hamnett quote here - “They [slogan T-shirts} are perfect propaganda tools. Anything you see written, it’s inside your brain. You have no filter that defends you." Did she foresee the power of tech-enabled tees? They would make dynamic fashion statements!
Precisely the purpose behind Scandinavian fashion retailer Carlings’ augmented reality T-shirt collection which launched in December 2019. Developed in partnership with creative agency Virtue, The Last Statement T-shirt can be virtually imprinted with a range of slogans accessible as filters on Instagram and Facebook. Built using Facebook’s AR platform Spark, the overlaid digital graphics conform hyper-realistically to the stretch and folds of the blank physical tee. Amazing! Amazing also is their ‘waste less’ approach to slogan fashion.The potential of AR slogan filters is huge, and it does surprise that there have not been significant developments in this direction. Are we excusably early?
Streetwear label The Hundreds revels in endorsing sarcastic humor like ‘I LOVE YOU BUT I HATE YOUR NFTs’ through its T-shirts. It is how the much loved brand approaches its clientele that is both wary and keen on the recent web iteration.
In December 2021, The Hundreds released its Adam Bomb wearables collection simultaneously in two disparate worlds - the physical, and the metaverse. Enthusiastic avatars in Decentraland strutted in the fashion brand’s iconic ‘NFTs ARE A SCAM’ slogan tees.
By self-definition, digital fashion is a medium of expression; can we fathom the enormously unexploited power of digital slogan tees to broadcast that expression (message)?! Dear brands, activists, … are you seeing this?
The political and cultural air of the 80s had fanned the slogan T-shirt fever. Five decades later, we are wearing T-shirts physically, virtually, and in the in-between reality (phygital). Bring the 80s unapologetic T-shirt movement into the evolved fashion ecology today - this proposition is of an in-your-face expression permeating all geographies (realities) and demographics; there are no two ways to look at it. That’s a thought I leave you with.
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This write was first published in Vagobond Magazine Vol 2 Issue 7. Hope you enjoyed the read! Do you perceive T-shirts as a medium to express yourself? Love to hear your voice <3 —- - Quanta, Fashion Editor at Vagobond Magazine