51 Neil P

T-shirts, Grr

Is it just me, or are modern T-shirts a million miles away from what we used to have back in the 90s? Back in the pure, innocent, virgin hey-day of T-shirts, when a slogan was a slogan and it didn’t consist of some stupid new-school saying put together shoddily by someone who thinks Graphic Design comes free with an Apple computer, times were good. You could go T-shirt shopping with the relative security that you would not come across horrendous logos and hideous, sexualized wording. There are too many facets of awful T-shirt design to go into here, but one of the most prevalent is the printing of sexy sayings on almost every T-shirt you can find.

T-shirts used to say “I Feel Good” or “I Love Great Britain” but now they say things like “I am the sexiest angel alive” and “HOT STUFF”. What happened? When did we get so desperate to tell the world what we think we are? I just find it very weird and a bit wrong. I think it should be up to other people to decide if a passerby is hot stuff or sexy of an angel. I just don’t like having it thrust all up in my face. It just doesn’t feel right! You may as well just have a t-shirt saying, ’My appointment at Botox Manchester is at 9am on a Monday’.

The worst thing is that there doesn’t seem to be any law or ruling against this kind of awful, distasteful visual pollution. If there was I am reasonably certain that about 80% of the population would be immediately up in court and some people would be going away for a very long time indeed–

What about the future of T-shirts? Who knows where it’ll go. We’ve already had the whole long T-shirt thing, which just seems odd, so I can’t even hazard a guess as to where it will go. I just hope it doesn’t involve more of the dodgy same.