Brock Press

Issue date: 3/6/07 Section: Focus

Media Credit: Katie Friesen

Perhaps the most ubiquitous of products, the design and function of a T-shirt is simple. It fits over your body, your arms go through two holes at either side, and your head goes through the hole at the top.
They are cheap and readily available, relatively comfortable, and they help to keep you warm and not exposed to the world. Sometimes they say funny things on them. End of story.
Not so fast.
With art, commerce and morality coming into play, the simple T-shirt is no longer, and never was, simply a T-shirt. For a generation drenched in irony and rampant sloganeering, the cultural importance of the T-shirt canvas is apparent to anyone who has traversed the corridors of any high school, university or shopping mall.
Ami Keahola, an editor of the design, technology and culture weblog Cool Hunting (coolhunting.com) said that, "As a fashion staple, it's taken on a symbolic status over time, making it full of significance as an everyday object and an effortless way to play on notions of high versus low culture".
Today's endless variety of T-shirts does just that. No longer a useless garment, masters of screenprinting, graphic arts, illustration and painting have embraced the T-shirt as a living canvas. Once overlooked as mere utility, and once even shocking to a society scared of atomic bombs and rebellious teeny-boppers, some of the most prestigious art and modern art galleries in the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and the Tate Modern in London have all released their own lines of T-shirts.
With countless online T-shirt shops and clubs springing up from Toronto to Tokyo, artists are using the plain cotton canvas as a medium of niche, specialized (and very often fantastically clever) expression of political will, philosophical enlightenments, or jokes about flatulence.
Still, they are overlooked daily and trivialized endlessly, but entire generations have co-opted the T-shirt as one of the chief means of personal expression.
"The T-shirt can be an art form. The tee is intensely personal, like a personal billboard," said Keahola.

It should come as no surprise that politics, personal expression and a high regard for comfortable, practical fashion is not a new idea. The history of the garment and its immediate impact on politics and fashion dates back to the early '30s, but articles of clothing resembling a "T" shape have been found throughout the world dating back hundreds, even thousands of years.

Continued...

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