![Last week, I was at work retreat in Collegeville, Minnesota, home of St. John’s University, alma mater of future Minnesota senator and liberal icon Eugene McCarthy (in fact, he studied to be a monk at the nearby Abbey before leaving for a life of politicking in St. Paul after a few months).
As with most small towns in Minnesota, there was a lake near the University with a pier, a small beach, and a wooden changing house. Standing on the beach eyeing our group with a mixture of boredom and skepticism was another thing you see around lakes, a surly teenage lifeguard. When my group came onto the beach, he peered out of the changing house, and as we sat on the pier, he shuffled around on the beach with his hands in his pockets, listening to a portable radio play the local Top 40 station.
There was something about this kid that I found absolutely incredible. Or maybe not the kid himself, but what he was wearing.
He wasn’t wearing the standard lifeguard outfit (red swimming trunks, I guess), because it was a little chilly, and we were clearly the only people that had been on the beach all day. Maybe afterschool teenage lifeguards don’t have regular uniforms in Collegeville. Instead, he was wearing baggy shorts, and one of those Hollister t-shirts that kids wear now, very similar to the sort pictured above.
Consider the extraordinary journey here, at the pinnacle of which this kid sits.
Sometime in the late-1970s or mid-1980s, forward-thinking twentysomething slackers start shopping at Salvation Army stores and buying graphic, screen-printed t-shirts bearing the names of companies, events, sports teams and ideas that they have no relation to. This probably begins because those sorts of t-shirts must have been incredibly cheap, but one imagines that there’s an absurdist quality to it, as well. It’s a cheap, ironic, and pretty funny gesture. Hey, wait, you didn’t attend the Larsen Family Reunion, New Liberty, Iowa, September 1982. You’re damn right I didn’t. Who needs families?
This sort of thing really picks up in the early 1990s. Think of Stephen Malkmus, whose t-shirt drawer circa 1993 was probably a vast Borges-like repository of every heartland cultural institution, large or small, of the preceding 50 years.
In particular — and god damn, I still see these whenever I am in New York City, adorning the frames of skinny, semi-unemployed Brooklyn man-children — t-shirts of high school, minor league and community sports teams are enormously popular. This is for a number of reasons, I think: lots of these types of shirts are made, one for every person on the team, so they’re out there in large quantities. Also, there’s thousands and thousands of these types of teams, everywhere, in every city, town and county in America, so the chance of finding a unique sports team is pretty good. Finally: sports. It’s a classic joke, still funny after thirty years. I’m a chubby dude with a beard that’s in three bands. Can you even believe I’d play on a sports team????????????
(Longtime readers will recall I devoted a whole week to this very topic in 2009.)
Anyway, at some point in the late-1990s or possibly the early parts of this century, the multinationals got in on the joke. Mall-oriented clothing retailers began printing t-shirts that bore the name of events and sports teams and regionally ethnic festivals that didn’t actually exist, or if they did, had no relationship to the corporation selling the t-shirt.
Then, at some point, it took a more insidious step forward. The fabricated events, personalities and institutions emblazoned on these t-shirts began to bear the names of the corporations themselves. Nothing new, of course — making teenagers cough up good money for the privilege of wearing advertisements is a time-honored tradition. However, this goes one level deeper. The teenagers are paying to wear advertisements for fake versions of real companies. Like Abercrombie & Fitch, which actually existed as a real company in the 1920s, but starting selling t-shirts for fake Abercrombie & Fitch-branded sports teams sometime in the late 1990s, t-shirts that looked like they might have come out of the 1920s, which is triply absurd because no one wore t-shirts in the 1920s in the first place.
Read this bunch of hooey from the Hollister Co. Wikipedia page, which I assure you will be one of the stupidest things you read all day:
All of Abercrombie & Fitch Co.’s spin-off brands have an elaborate pseudo-history…to give meaning and feeling to the brand image of the Hollister conceptional character named John M. Hollister. An adventurous youth, he spent his youth practicing sports in the waters of Maine. He graduated from Yale University in 1915 at the age of 21. Not wanting the high-life his father established for him in Manhattan, the young man boarded a succession of steamboats, finally arriving in the Dutch East Indies by 1917. There, he bought a rubber plantation [Ed.’s note: plantation?!?!?!?!?!] from the fictitious Gregory Van Gilder, and soon came to know and love Gilder’s daughter, Meta. [Ed.’s note: Meta?!?!?!?!?! It’s like they’re trying to make fun of you.] Afterwards, Hollister sold the land, and with half of the money purchased a 50-foot (15 m) schooner on which he and Meta spent two years sailing the South Pacific Ocean treasuring the diverse cultures. John and Meta harboured in Los Angeles in 1919, and married in the late fall. John M. Hollister, Jr. was born in 1920, and after “discovering California and himself” with his love for the South Pacific in mind John Sr. established Hollister Co. in 1922 in Laguna Beach…Abercrombie & Fitch Co. calls the story “a story of passion, youth and love of the sea [carrying] the harmony of romance, beauty, adventure.”
Blech.
Anyway, teenagers of every conceivable socioeconomic background and ethnicity wear this junk. Most of these shirts are made to create the impression that the wearer had some affiliation with Old Man Hollister’s surf club.
Which brings us back to the lifeguard in Collegeville.
The lifeguard was wearing the shirt pictured above (or one a lot like it). An actual, literal lifeguard was wearing a fake lifeguard t-shirt, made to appear as if it had been purchased from a fake surf shop, manufactured by a real clothing company, made for and sold to real teenagers that are not lifeguards, to make them appear as if they are fake lifeguards, or as if they beat up a fake lifeguard and stole his or her t-shirt. But that’s the thing! This damned kid actually is a real lifeguard! He is a real lifeguard dressed up by a real company fronting as a fake surf shop to resemble a fake lifeguard!
It gave me a serious headache. I had to leave immediately and take the rest of the day off. Whether this kid was aware of it or not, he may actually be the owner of the most purely ironic t-shirt in the world today.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lscnffrBtC1qzr7dwo1_400.png)
Last week, I was at work retreat in Collegeville, Minnesota, home of St. John’s University, alma mater of future Minnesota senator and liberal icon Eugene McCarthy (in fact, he studied to be a monk at the nearby Abbey before leaving for a life of politicking in St. Paul after a few months).
As with most small towns in Minnesota, there was a lake near the University with a pier, a small beach, and a wooden changing house. Standing on the beach eyeing our group with a mixture of boredom and skepticism was another thing you see around lakes, a surly teenage lifeguard. When my group came onto the beach, he peered out of the changing house, and as we sat on the pier, he shuffled around on the beach with his hands in his pockets, listening to a portable radio play the local Top 40 station.
There was something about this kid that I found absolutely incredible. Or maybe not the kid himself, but what he was wearing.
He wasn’t wearing the standard lifeguard outfit (red swimming trunks, I guess), because it was a little chilly, and we were clearly the only people that had been on the beach all day. Maybe afterschool teenage lifeguards don’t have regular uniforms in Collegeville. Instead, he was wearing baggy shorts, and one of those Hollister t-shirts that kids wear now, very similar to the sort pictured above.
Consider the extraordinary journey here, at the pinnacle of which this kid sits.
Sometime in the late-1970s or mid-1980s, forward-thinking twentysomething slackers start shopping at Salvation Army stores and buying graphic, screen-printed t-shirts bearing the names of companies, events, sports teams and ideas that they have no relation to. This probably begins because those sorts of t-shirts must have been incredibly cheap, but one imagines that there’s an absurdist quality to it, as well. It’s a cheap, ironic, and pretty funny gesture. Hey, wait, you didn’t attend the Larsen Family Reunion, New Liberty, Iowa, September 1982. You’re damn right I didn’t. Who needs families?
This sort of thing really picks up in the early 1990s. Think of Stephen Malkmus, whose t-shirt drawer circa 1993 was probably a vast Borges-like repository of every heartland cultural institution, large or small, of the preceding 50 years.
In particular — and god damn, I still see these whenever I am in New York City, adorning the frames of skinny, semi-unemployed Brooklyn man-children — t-shirts of high school, minor league and community sports teams are enormously popular. This is for a number of reasons, I think: lots of these types of shirts are made, one for every person on the team, so they’re out there in large quantities. Also, there’s thousands and thousands of these types of teams, everywhere, in every city, town and county in America, so the chance of finding a unique sports team is pretty good. Finally: sports. It’s a classic joke, still funny after thirty years. I’m a chubby dude with a beard that’s in three bands. Can you even believe I’d play on a sports team????????????
(Longtime readers will recall I devoted a whole week to this very topic in 2009.)
Anyway, at some point in the late-1990s or possibly the early parts of this century, the multinationals got in on the joke. Mall-oriented clothing retailers began printing t-shirts that bore the name of events and sports teams and regionally ethnic festivals that didn’t actually exist, or if they did, had no relationship to the corporation selling the t-shirt.
Then, at some point, it took a more insidious step forward. The fabricated events, personalities and institutions emblazoned on these t-shirts began to bear the names of the corporations themselves. Nothing new, of course — making teenagers cough up good money for the privilege of wearing advertisements is a time-honored tradition. However, this goes one level deeper. The teenagers are paying to wear advertisements for fake versions of real companies. Like Abercrombie & Fitch, which actually existed as a real company in the 1920s, but starting selling t-shirts for fake Abercrombie & Fitch-branded sports teams sometime in the late 1990s, t-shirts that looked like they might have come out of the 1920s, which is triply absurd because no one wore t-shirts in the 1920s in the first place.
Read this bunch of hooey from the Hollister Co. Wikipedia page, which I assure you will be one of the stupidest things you read all day:
All of Abercrombie & Fitch Co.’s spin-off brands have an elaborate pseudo-history…to give meaning and feeling to the brand image of the Hollister conceptional character named John M. Hollister. An adventurous youth, he spent his youth practicing sports in the waters of Maine. He graduated from Yale University in 1915 at the age of 21. Not wanting the high-life his father established for him in Manhattan, the young man boarded a succession of steamboats, finally arriving in the Dutch East Indies by 1917. There, he bought a rubber plantation [Ed.’s note: plantation?!?!?!?!?!] from the fictitious Gregory Van Gilder, and soon came to know and love Gilder’s daughter, Meta. [Ed.’s note: Meta?!?!?!?!?! It’s like they’re trying to make fun of you.] Afterwards, Hollister sold the land, and with half of the money purchased a 50-foot (15 m) schooner on which he and Meta spent two years sailing the South Pacific Ocean treasuring the diverse cultures. John and Meta harboured in Los Angeles in 1919, and married in the late fall. John M. Hollister, Jr. was born in 1920, and after “discovering California and himself” with his love for the South Pacific in mind John Sr. established Hollister Co. in 1922 in Laguna Beach…Abercrombie & Fitch Co. calls the story “a story of passion, youth and love of the sea [carrying] the harmony of romance, beauty, adventure.”
Blech.
Anyway, teenagers of every conceivable socioeconomic background and ethnicity wear this junk. Most of these shirts are made to create the impression that the wearer had some affiliation with Old Man Hollister’s surf club.
Which brings us back to the lifeguard in Collegeville.
The lifeguard was wearing the shirt pictured above (or one a lot like it). An actual, literal lifeguard was wearing a fake lifeguard t-shirt, made to appear as if it had been purchased from a fake surf shop, manufactured by a real clothing company, made for and sold to real teenagers that are not lifeguards, to make them appear as if they are fake lifeguards, or as if they beat up a fake lifeguard and stole his or her t-shirt. But that’s the thing! This damned kid actually is a real lifeguard! He is a real lifeguard dressed up by a real company fronting as a fake surf shop to resemble a fake lifeguard!
It gave me a serious headache. I had to leave immediately and take the rest of the day off. Whether this kid was aware of it or not, he may actually be the owner of the most purely ironic t-shirt in the world today.
