I share a birth year with “The Facebook.” In 2004, social media started to take over as the dominant mode of connection and fashion seemed to begin favoring aesthetics over individualism. And that’s when the era of truly great T-shirts began to die.
I grew up a nervous, artsy kid in South Carolina, and snide remarks at recess made me think my opinions and interests were too bizarre to speak aloud. I wanted to express inner boldness through my appearance instead, but the clothing in malls bored me: There were lots of expensive, plain garments garnished with brand logos, which didn’t broadcast a point of view so much as class.
So I started helping myself to my parents’ closet. In place of heirlooms, my lower-middle-class family has passed down old T-shirts. They’re inexpensive, practical souvenirs that archive the past, and their high-quality materials and workmanship have endured years of rowdy travels. These mementos also suggested that my parents’ youth was much more vibrant than mine.
My mother’s most prized shirt, from 1978, was tragically lost during the Reagan administration, but its legacy lives in her frequent stories about it: It featured the mantra “Pobody’s Nerfect” accompanied by a cheesing, bucktoothed monster. This offbeat sincerity, this encouragement to fail and look silly, captivated me — perhaps because my generation seems to view embarrassment as a moral failure. So I wore my father’s band tees and my mother’s quippy one-liners as tethers to their values and tastes.
In high school, one day, I wore one of these vintage-to-me shirts as an act of pointed defiance. My desperate plea to be exempt from gym class had been denied. So while everyone else donned the mandatory spandex, I — previously a studious, overachieving brown-noser in every way — wore tractionless Vans, flimsy shorts and my dad’s hole-ridden “Magnum, P.I.” T-shirt. It became a daily act of insubordination.
During a dodgeball game, a girl I’d never spoken to before looked toward my shirt.
“My dad likes that show,” she said.
“Same.”
A quiet allyship blossomed between us. She picked me for every team, and I taught her how to avoid running the mile by hiding behind football equipment. Our friendship got me through the semester. My gym teacher’s scrutiny dissipated into ambivalence, and I somehow received an A.
T-shirts have long been a form of self-expression. After the adoption of Plastisol ink in the 1950s and ’60s democratized screen printing, mass-produced tees were enthusiastically adopted by hobbyists, hippies and anyone else who wanted to wear their opinions on their chests. Slogans tended to be cheeky and playful — from John Lennon’s anti-Vietnam War pacifist anthem “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” to lines like “Jesus saves because he shops at Kmart.”
Creative tees are of course still around, abundant at places like Urban Outfitters and Target and Hot Topic. But they’re often made with flimsy materials, their text overly focused on trendy jokes, brand names or symbology. Clever language is often relegated to back-of-shirt obscurity. This reticence feels like a manifestation of my generation’s unwillingness to plainly communicate face to face. And when modern tees do get genuinely political, slogans feel cynical and angry, instead of earnest and thought-provoking.
When I wear one of my parents’ preinternet T-shirts, I feel myself growing bolder and more interested in the ideals their older generation embraced — love, sex, rejection and foolishness. I like collecting plenty of other old trinkets, but there’s greater intimacy in what I wear rather than what I own. The fibers of my old shirts weren’t just around during protests and counterculture movements but active participants in them.
As I grew older, I started to acquire my own vintage T-shirts. I looked for bright colors, extinct design techniques or hyper-specific messages over imagery. When I got my first essay accepted into a publication, I bought a 1970s “I AM A WRITER” shirt. Its frank sincerity, created in the era of Sontag and Babitz, was a tenable defense against impostor syndrome. Into my 20s, wearing vintage tees also lessened my anxieties about sex and dating. My dead-stock “South Park” shirt roused a love affair the old-fashioned way — without the aid of dating apps. My clothes became calibration tools, helping weed out generic attention and attract people who specifically shared my nostalgic interests.
Recently, for months, I hunted eBay and Depop for a specific early 2000s slogan tee that I first saw on Pinterest: “Elvis is dead/Sinatra is dead/And me I feel also not so good.” I wanted to be imbued with the posthumous swagger of these late greats — and I developed an obsession with the self-assured, hypothetical version of me who would wear it. When I finally found the shirt, I wore it to a concert, solo, and became that person. I danced with an eccentric folk musician and gave my number to a stranger. Post-show, the drummer of the opening band said he dug my shirt. A whiskey cost me two hours of my server’s wages, and my phone died on the subway. It was the most rock ’n’ roll I’d ever felt.
Great things happen to those with great T-shirts. When I wear one of my vintage finds, I am not only connected to the brave attitudes of the freaks, dorks, artists and activists from the past who made and wore them, and I’m not only channeling the stories of my parents — I am, for the first time, collecting my own stories. My latest purchase, a Heinz mustard yellow, single-stitch tee, declares in flock-printed lettering: “GO FOR IT.”
Maddie Barron is a writer and journalist from South Carolina.
The post T-Shirts Gave Me the Education I Never Got at School appeared first on New York Times.
