THE T-SHIRT: A BLANK CANV ANK CANVAS AS
From humble beginnings, the T-shirt, like Levi’s jeans, transformed itself from a basic working-class, utilitarian garment into a postmodernist signpost that advertised and expressed personal interests and individual beliefs. Constructing identity through life-style is determined by ‘the type of popular cultural products we consume, and the creative uses to which we put these products or commodities’ (Kidd, 2002: 109).
Just like the T-shirt, new products—like the beanbag (designed by Gatti, Teodoro and Paolini in 1968–9)—spoke to one’s emotional and sensual, rather than functional, needs. The quest to de ne ‘self’ amongst postmodernist youth culture was paralleled by the popularity and rise of the T-shirt. The new consumerist-led society relied on diversity and changeability, which was precisely what the inexpensive T-shirt offered.
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A CULTURAL HISTORY OF FASHION IN THE 20TH AND 21ST CENTURIESLike blue jeans, T-shirts have become cultural icons, and are usually discussed within a paradigm of capitalism, sociability and leisure lifestyles. The visual pluralism that they offer includes expressions of social or political beliefs or af liations, and likes or interests, and they easily become an advertisement for commercial products or a medium for self-expression. They replace postcards or photographs, depicting the places that one has visited, as well as acting as a souvenir of one’s travels. The ‘I NY’ slogan by Milton Glazier has been copied by cities around the world, but srcinated in New York—the home of the quick message. Madison Avenue, famous for its ‘ad men’, used T-shirts in the 1940s to gain support for the presidential elections. Long before anyone else, they comprehended the potential of clothing as a new form of vi-sual dialogue.
The T-shirt has been described as a form of ‘political poster’, and as a tattoo that
‘acts as a second skin’. As a graphic tool, it has become a mandatory means of sar-torial protest for the young. Protest campaigns about Civil Rights and the Vietnam War were referenced in the visual ar ts. Graphic designers such as R&K Brown (1969) in their appropriated Iwo Jima photograph, and George Maciunas’s (1969) American Flag poster protested about genocide committed by American troops in con icts over the century. In 1968, Japanese artist Hirokatsu, as a reminder of the Second World War, created a poster entitled No More Hiroshimas , and Ron Borowski’s sar-donic photograph of a black American, with an American ag superimposed over his face, read: ‘I pledge allegiance to the ag of the USA . . . where all men are cre-ated equal’. T-shirts were worn to street marches as a sign of peaceful protest, with their verbal and visual references acting as effective communication tools, bridging language and cultural barriers. Both the hippies of the 1960s and the punks of the 1970s used the T-shirt as a means of protest and propaganda, with perhaps one of the most controversial being produced by fashion designer V ivienne Westwood in 1977. The image of Queen Elizabeth with a safety pin through her nose was a bold political statement that enraged the British, and was seen as an unforgivable act of rebellion.
With the invention of Pastisol in 1959, a plastic printing ink that couldn’t be washed out of fabric, plastic transfers and spray paint, the mass production of T-shirts gathered speed in the 1960s. By 1965, marketing professionals had begun to recognize the T-shirt as a medium for exploiting product branding internationally. As a walking billboard, they provided unpaid advertising for companies such as Budweiser, Coca-Cola, Disneyland and, later, sporting companies such as Nike and Slazenger.
The use of constant repetition as a tool, adopted by commercial television advertise-ments to hypnotize viewers, inspired Warhol’s silkscreen multiple prints of Campbell’s soup tins.
In much the same way that Warhol’s images were seen as a blatant comment on consumerism and the manipulation of the public by advertising agencies and media
POSTMODERNISM AND FASHION
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corporations, the T-shirt serves a similar purpose. They use both irony and satire to critique the super cialities of society. Most effectively, they are used as a means of ex-pressing cynicism about the dominant culture. They can make provocative statements about racism, gender, violence and obscenity. Postmodernist artists use humour ex-tensively to point out the contradictions and complexities of modern life. As a form of self-expression or self-branding, the T-shirt conveys messages to others indicating one’s preference for a particular style of music or band, and acts as a conversational catalyst for like-minded people. Musicians and rock groups use T-shirts as ‘memora-bilia retailing’ for their tours, seen as an important part of the promotional fanfare.
Slogans such as ‘I’m High on Life’, ‘The Anti-Everything T-Shirt’ and ‘Born Free’ were popular in the 1960s and 1970s.
Fashion historian Leslie Watson (2003) explains how the 1980s ushered in politi-cal correctness and social awareness in London. She notes that designer Katherine Hamnett launched a T-shirt collection called Choose Life—clothes with a social mes-sage, including ‘Stop Acid Rain’, ‘Preserve the Rainforests’ and ’58% Don’t Want Pershing’. The last-mentioned shirt (a protest against the deployment of American nuclear weapons in Britain) was worn by the designer herself when she met Prime Min-ister Margaret Thatcher at Downing Street in 1984 (2003: 125). Ecological T-shirts were made of cotton that had been grown without the use of pesticides or from recy-cled materials. It seems that the greater the commitment to a cause, the more blatant the message becomes.
Clothing speaks to both strangers and observers (Finkelstein, 1996: 79). In art, like fashion, the T-shirt has been used to re ect the culture of the street and the everyday, and has turned T-shirts with slogans into art objects. Artist Jenny Holzer produced an
‘Abuse of Power Comes as No Surprise’ T-shirt, while graf ti artist Keith Haring used T-shirts to bridge the gap between the street (the subway, actually) and the museum.
These T-shirts—also Hamnett’s protest shirts—were exhibited at the Documenta VII exhibition, held at the Fashion Moda Gallery in East Village New York in 1982. Chris Townsend, inRapture: Art’s Seduction by Fashion (2002), remarks that: ‘For a while, both art and fashion were uni ed in making the billboard for the body’. He elaborates:
The model of artist-driven retailing developed by Fashion Moda, with its roots in Claes Oldenburg’s pop art project The Store , would persist as an enterprise to which young art-ists could resort to sell their ideas, turned into low-priced editions. The T-shirt as cheap medium for artwork, made by that art into a statement of individuality, would likewise remain a staple of such activities. Amongst the most notorious of such enterprises was the shop run by Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas in East London in the early 1990s. The self-deprecating irony of their ‘Complete Arsehole’ T-shirt neatly summarizes a shift in concerns over a decade of art practice, from the ideological earnestness of the early 1980s to a micro-celebrity culture where individual identity was paramount, even in its mocking erasure. Fashion, as much as art, could readily accommodate both extremes.
(2002: 47)