Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Conversation >

Shirts of yore

MattShepherd: I WEDDED KALI!

20:01 / 17.08.06

My Invisible Records white long-sleeve is dead, alas.

I bought this shirt at a Pigface show in Montreal about a decade ago, and it was My Favourite Shirt for years and years. A long-sleeve white T, with a black collar and black piping running down the arms to black cuffs, the Invisible Records logo on the front, nothing on the back.

Most people where I live had never even heard of the label, so it was basically a longsleeve white T with cool piping that said INVISIBLE on the front.

Eventually, time took its toll. A little tear here, a little rip there, getting hit by a pickup along the highway while cycling resulting in the left shoulder (mine and the shirt's) being shredded by gravel, a few housepainting accidents, a couple of food stains, and general wear downgraded it from a wear-anywhere shirt to a relaxin'-at-home shirt, and then to a workout shirt, and then the inevitable, final plunge into renovation shirt.

Once a shirt has reached renovation shirt, it's counting the days to "rags."

And that day came last week.

The Invisible Shirt is now going to be used for staining, mopping-up, dusting, and probably some blood-sopping when I cut myself doing something stupid with a reciprocating saw again.

Invisible Records is no more, having become "Underground Inc.", a name change that I really dislike.

The shirt is out of print and out of stock.

I'm sad.

ONLY NICE THINGS

00:59 / 18.08.06

Blame the gays, dude.

02:15 / 18.08.06

Tt. Naughty Haus.

Matt, just thu-row the thing away. It was your fave shirt once, but now it's gone. Accept its fate as an oil rag. Sentimental attachments to material objects are a short trip to the world of the batty uncle/aunt, insofar as if you aren't fairly hard-edged about what, realistically, you actually need, you basically end up with a room, then a flat, and then a house full of junk. Which might seem all right, but then there's the dust, the cats, the issues raised at the divorce hearings, and the ambulance, finally, showing up to clean up the mess two weeks after you've shuffled off the mortal coil, and the emergency services have to fight their way up through all the Simpsons videos/blues albums/novels by Philip K Dick etc, just to peel your remains up off the carpet.

If you're genuinely mourning a shirt, I do understand. I had an MC Tunes t-shirt in lavender once, with 'MC Tunes' redone as the Warner Bros logo. I suppose I do miss that.

But I mean, not that much, you know?

02:47 / 18.08.06

My favorite shirt of yore...

A white shirt with a picture of an iconic voodoo doll surrounded by dancing stick figures and bones with VOO above and DOO below. As far as I know it had nothing to do with anything (least of all vodou) other than a designer thinking it would look good on a shirt. And it did.

I finally wore through it on three sides around '00 or 01. Google had been of little use in helping me locate a replacement, but there was just enough of the original screen-printing to scan, so that's what I did. Somewhere on one of my backup cds there's a 100mb scan of it, just waiting for me to bust out the mad Illustrator skills, waiting to live again.

Waiting.

03:14 / 19.08.06

My old Survival Research Labs "Deliberately False Statements" t-shirt. Quite literally wore it until it fell into rags.

Also the black t-shirt with the Rose Cross I got from Mark Metz's shop Ameba in SF in 1992 or thereabouts. I still miss that one. Wonder what happened to it?

Still have the Fuck School t-shirt from Unamerican.com, but never wear it these days . . .

09:20 / 21.08.06

My favourite shirt is a b&w long-sleeved t-shirt, made out of some kind of eco-friendly, fair-traded wood derivative which just happens to be incredibly soft and snuggly. On it it says:

snootygrrrl: see also: erudite, bookish, juvenile delinquent, sexy librarian type, smart-ass.

I wear it all the time when I'm not at work, it's my lucky fiction-writing t-shirt, and I live in fear of spilling something on it. They used to be sold in Secession Books in Bath, a gorgeous little independent bookshop. But the bookshop has closed down, as I discovered when I went there in search of a spare t-shirt, because the owners decided that the income from an independent bookshop was too risky, given that they had small children, so they decided to... start a band.

Anyway, so now my gf is emailing them on a regular basis trying to get them to send us any t-shirts they have left over, and they keep emailing back going sure, dude! as soon as things are less busy with the band!

miss wonderstarr

10:43 / 21.08.06

I had a tshirt by a female cartoonist with (I think) some kind of heavy-lashed flirt on the front, and the caption "I used to be snow white, but I drifted". I liked it so much I never wore the thing, and now I have no idea where it is.

See also: my Battleship Potemkin t-shirt
my Primitives, "Pure" t-shirt
my XL t-shirt with "slug" and a cartoon slug on it that was "Too Nice To Wear in Bed" as planned

moral: white t-shirts with logos and designs I really like never get worn

----------
a question for the thread: what is the best way to get a design printed onto a single t-shirt? I had a great one done at a copy shop years ago ("Off-Duty Tranny" ~ I actually wore it a lot too, even though it was white) and I am toying with another design now but don't know where such things are done these days. (I see you can order them online, but that seems a bit of a roundabout and less reliable method).

The alternative would be using fabric pens or paints and doing it by hand, which might be fun. Has anyone done that and can you offer advice?

miss wonderstarr

10:45 / 21.08.06

I had another great t-shirt with "Jessamy", the heroine of a comic strip that ran (I think) in short-lived comic/music magazine "Heartbreak Hotel" during the late 80s. I wore during the day, then I wore it in bed, then it fell to bits.

12:02 / 21.08.06

I had a t-shirt that I got from the premiere of the movie 'turbulence' which was black with the title in red on the front and ''fear is the the air'' on the back. I used to wear it at every basketball practice I went to for two years (that means a lot) In the end, the shirt was so thin that we could almost see through it. It got a decent death though.. After managing to put a really powerfull move on someone, he fell down to the floor, I got over him and ripped my shirt right off my body and threw it at his face. We still have good laughs about that one since it is sooo not my style to pull something like this.

12:14 / 21.08.06

Wonderstarr;

I *think* you can still get a t-shirt printed at most decent copy shops these days. I had one done a couple of years ago (it was from The Filth, if anyone's interested; the panel where Sharon Jones says 'He can speak through here "Ooh baby! I used to make $750,000 a year as a lawyer until Simon paid for my gradual transformation into a mindless living machine"' - I'm not sure where it is now, but I suppose I do miss it a bit,) and hopefully things haven't changed too much since.

07:31 / 22.08.06

I had a Massive Attack shirt that I bought at a concert in the early 90's. It had a painting of a man with his head exploding on the front. The image was designed by John Squire, ex Stone Rose, IIRC,

I wore it once to pass through the airport in Jerusalem and consequently G and I were interrogated rigorously and at length, like something out of a film, by security staff. I am an idiot.

19:37 / 22.08.06

I love my shirt. I love my shirt. My shirt is so comfortably lovely.

I have a compartment in my closet devoted to shirts I can't quite throw out; most of them are grungy things I made myself by hand, so they fall more in the tattered old notebooks category than the outdated/worn clothing category.

08:10 / 21.09.06

Wonderstarr, I had a t-shirt printed with a drawing my son did - it was a gift to his Dad for his birthday. It was printed on navy and it worked brilliantly.

I had it done at the local copy shop in the little town I was working in at the time (Salisbury) and I just gave them a jpeg file.

If they can do it well then any London copy-shop will.

My Mom Thinks I'm Cool

13:16 / 21.09.06

mine generally get destroyed on camping trips. the white Dragonball Z tshirt got ripped by aggressive foliage. the green Godzilla tshirt was used as a bandage for a friend who fell off a cliff. I think there's still some bloodstained "King of the Monsters" fabric in my apartment somewhere.

Tuna Ghost: Pratt knot hero

00:06 / 22.09.06

Do hooded sweatshirts count as shirts? Because I desire a hoodie right now more than any other article of clothing. It's black and has the Battle Royal insignia from the movie on the left breast and "I just killed my best friend" written on the back. Tacky and a little lame, sure, but I saw some guy at the grocery store with it and I yearned for it immediately.

If hooded sweatshirts don't count, I'd have to say I mourned pretty hard when my little sister stole my Middle Tennessee State University t-shirt, white with black collar (and black sleeve collars, whatever they're called, can't think of the name), and MTSU in faded print over the school seal. Aside from the fact it fit me perfectly and was a fantastic summer shirt, it reminded me of my time at the University, which, despite the complicated situation that caused me to flee and never return, I enjoyed tremendously (if you absolutely have to waste a year and a half of your life, try doing it there. It's a great place to do it).

The worst part is, she only wore it for less than a few seasons before it was lost to some obscure part of her closet. I would have loved that shirt for years.

01:00 / 22.09.06

Ah, Murfeesboro. Been there, done that. I don't know when you were last there, but that place has grown.

03:30 / 22.09.06

shirty regrets:

i lived through the 80's and somehow didn't end up owning a bright yellow t-shirt with a basic black 'stüssy' logo. this makes me sad.

i lived through the 90's and somehow didn't end up owning this shirt:

I know, kind of hard to see... but that's reagan, eazy-e, patrick swayze, and some dude named jeff. this also makes me sad.

03:40 / 22.09.06

link

tuna ghost-

if you manage to snatch up a 'large' and they run out of them before i get a chance to get one, i might be forced to re-think my alliances...

Tuna Ghost: Pratt knot hero

07:24 / 22.09.06

Close but no cigar. The one I saw just had the logo on the front and the script on the back, no picture or anything. But thank you anyway.

lonely as a cloud...

08:11 / 22.09.06

I briefly had a kinda dark tan coloured t-shirt, with black trim on the neck and sleeves, and a black crown of thorns on the front. I only got to wear it around twice, 'cos my damn washing machine somehow mangled one of the sleeves beyond repair. Grrrr! I liked the shirt so much partly because I liked the design, but also because it was a Gsus shirt (which are usually pretty expensive) that I'd got in a sale for a very low price.