T-shirt Article

Never underestimate the power of a martini
when drafting a business plan. This point
may not be taught at the Wharton School, but
it is probably worth keeping in mind. It was
over a boozy discussion of guy trouble three
years ago that Kristin Bauer and Liz Vassey
had the light-bulb moment that led them to
found JustDumped.com, a company that makes
T-shirts with slogans that read like
semaphores flared from the battleground of
contemporary romance."It seemed so unfair
that you had to hang around with someone for
six months before you found out what their
issues were," Bauer said by telephone from
the annex of the house in Burbank, Calif.,
where she runs her business. "Why not put it
all out front?"

Why not? The first shirts produced by the
two women, who both work regularly as
actresses, bore the tag lines, "Wasn’t
picked for Cheerleading," "Ignore Me and I’m
Yours" and "Emotionally Unavailable Men
Rock." If the messages were a little heavy
on the ironic masochism, the result of the
women’s impromptu foray into business was
surprisingly empowering.

"We had six of each phrase printed up for
$15 a shirt, which is an outrageous price I
found out later," Bauer said. "And I wore
one to all the press stuff for a show I was
doing for NBC called ‘Hidden Hills.’ "

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The sitcom was eventually pulled, but the
shirts caught on when a TV Guide reporter
wrote an item about Bauer’s new company, so
loosely organized at the time that it lacked
a dedicated phone line. "After TV Guide came
out, we got a call that ‘Extra!’ wanted to
do a story. We had 60 shirts we were giving
to a few friends and a Web site that didn’t
work. So we went out to dinner, were
drinking martinis again, came back and
logged on and there were 500 orders," Bauer
said. "We decided, ‘OK, I guess we get some
boxes and figure this thing out.’ "

Without realizing it, the two women had
accidentally stumbled into the slipstream of
a pop cultural trend.

Lately limited edition T-shirts, most likely
made in someone’s cellar in Brooklyn, have
suddenly become the hipster’s preferred mode
of expression. Whether produced by college
pals with studio art degrees or sold by
highly organized Web companies like
threadless.com – visitors to the site offer
ideas and vote on designs, which are then
put into microproduction – the limited
edition T-shirt has become impossible to
avoid.

Often crude and uncommercial-looking, its
imagery represents a kind of generational
response to the bland uniformity of the
mass-marketed "vintage" lines found in every
mall. This development has not been lost on
those same manufacturers, however. Some are
already producing T-shirts that mimic the do
it yourself look of indie T-shirts.
"T-shirts are a really cheap blank slate,"
said Ariel Foxman, the editor of Cargo,
Conde Nast’s shopping magazine for men.
"People have found a relatively inexpensive
way to distinguish themselves."

The trend partly reflects the great
democratic welter of the e-commerce ether,
and it partly serves as a marker of hipness,
defined by the savvy with which a consumer
can navigate the Web labyrinth in search of
the coolest obscurities. For a snapshot of
the estimated 1,500 sites now selling
limited edition T-shirts, one might double
click on Wowch.com, whose designs ring
changes on the visual conventions of
painting-on-velvet kitsch, or to Trainwreck
Industries, a 10,000-shirts-a-year site run
by a San Francisco designer, Alec Patience,
whose motifs run to sight gags like Mao as a
D.J., or Che Guevara’s face morphed into
that of Ace Frehley, the lead guitarist of
the rock band Kiss.

For that matter, one might even check out
Prada’s recent foray into the arena, a
collaboration with the Chilean graffiti
artist Flavien Demarigny, also known as
Mambo. His shirt, the first in a series of
proposed limited edition T-shirts grouped
under the highfalutin’ title "Unspoken
Dialogues," has a drawing of a figure and a
boom box that could politely be termed an
homage to Keith Haring, as if drawn by a
5-year- old.

"It all goes hand in hand with the vintage
thing," said Molly Spaulding, the proprietor
of Narnia, an inventive boutique on the
Lower East Side of Manhattan that was known
as Pullover until about a week ago. "People
like the idea that there’s only one, there’s
only one size. They like the feeling that
it’s their own style."

That identification with what Kim France,
the editor of Lucky magazine, calls "the
thinking coolsters," may help account for
the insider fan base behind the success of
Kadorables, a subscription T-shirt company
Paul Marlow and Matthew Sandager run from a
cellar hidden below a sewing factory in
Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

In a subterranean space that can be reached
through sidewalk trap doors, Sandager, a
32-year-old graphic designer, and Marlow,
33, who has a background in fashion, print
their designs onto T-shirts that are then
sold to subscribers who have paid $145 to
receive a shirt a month by mail for five
months. Like Bauer and Vassey, the
Kadorables duo (the name is a loose play on
a Spanish phrase meaning, roughly, "How
cute") hatched their T-shirt business
several years ago over drinks with a friend.

"We were just boys who wear jeans and great
tennis shoes, and we wanted great T-shirts,"
Sandager said. "And a friend said, ‘Why
don’t you make me five shirts and gave us
some cash.’ "

Now, Kadorables shirts have been featured in
GQ and Cargo and the two are on their 34th
edition of shirts in oddly appealing de
rigueur drab colors and with unassuming and
often primitive graphic motifs. "In order to
buy into it, you have to go into the unknown
and be excited about that," Sandager said.

As recently as three years ago, when mass
marketers latched onto the Salvation Army
tastes of a generation, a consumer bored
with fake vintage trucker or high school
team T-shirts would have been lucky to
happen on a place like Zakka, an inventive
boutique in Manhattan.

There, in what amounts to a toy store for
the dedicatedly hip, Toshiki Okazaki, the
owner, sold the obligatory anime drawings
and plastic collectibles by James Jarvis or
Be(AT)rbrick, alongside racks of
delightfully original and subversive shirts
silk-screened by artists as well known as
Ryan McGinnis or as obscure as Print Mafia,
Civil Defense, Akane Kodani, Star Electric
Eighty Eight or Mana Mizukuchi, a Japanese
graphics designer whose bleach-painted
T-shirts go on view at the Grand Street
store at the end of the month.

"With a T-shirt, it is much easier to show
your work than trying to find a gallery,"
said Okazaki, referring to the production of
T-shirts in limited editions made by artists
looking less for a killing than a populist
way to present their art. "Four years ago,
nobody really did this," he said.

These days, whenever two or more people
gather to consider the future of consumer
society, "customization" and "niche" are
certain to be their most frequently uttered
terms. Bored and satiated, consumers first
took music dissemination into their own
hands, via Internet programs like Napster,
and then information, in the form of blogs,
and, finally, even so-called hard goods, now
that it is clear that anyone, more or less,
can start a clothing company. As with garage
bands and personal Web pages, a little
alcoholic lubrication rarely seems to hurt
at the point of conception; neither does a
taste for unabashed amateurishness, communal
expression and the exuberantly ad hoc.

"We could spin our wheels and do progressive
graphics all day long, but we didn’t want a
force-fed brand aesthetic," said Olin
McKenzie an architect and partner in
Momimomi, a three-year-old two-man operation
based in Los Angeles. Their limited-edition
T-shirts feature poetic images inspired by
aerial photographs of freeway traffic
patterns or else drawings made from
photographs of friends asked to enact
expressions of joy or rage.

"The beauty of this whole thing is that no
one’s trapped by a dominant brand
aesthetic," McKenzie said. "And if you’re
not locked into that, then the aesthetic is
free to change." There is, of course, one
other irresistible element of the T-shirt as
cultural marker and Web-era phenomenon.
"T-shirts, like blue jeans, are forever,"
McKenzie said. "Nobody is going to stop
wearing them any time soon."