Tagged as “ironic t-shirts of the 1990s”

Jun 12 5:02 pm

The ironic T-shirts of the 1990s: a look back.

Sometime you should try devoting your blog or Tumblr solely to a single broad subject for some prolonged period of time, reader. Despite the inevitable unfollowings, grumbling readership and dwindling returns, it does instill in you a sense of purposefulness and focus that is strangely rewarding. Such an undertaking rewards extended periods of critical thinking, and encourages the creation of unexpected connections between disparate phenomenon. Always positive, right?

Anyway, here is a recap of our weeklong Ironic T-shirts of the 1990s miniseries, in case you missed out the first time:

“I found it in my dad’s closet! I don’t even know what it means!” Literally thousands of emails. Giving the middle school power class dominion over irony is like giving the Czar all your vodka. Every used, size Medium graphic T-shirt printed in America between 1980 and 1995. The 18th Century technology of showing up someplace has truly been replaced by…by what?

A 1983 Vassar debate team T-shirt would have commanded a great deal of respect. Who wants to provide a ready-made icebreaker for the kind of weirdos whose courage is plucked up by a vintage Kiss tee shirt? Sartorial tastes forged in the flames of the 1990s. Zines, cardigans, mixtapes and respect for Evan Dando. At home in Seattle in 1998. A cave of shiny things the raven had stolen off of trucks loaded with strange treasures. Taxing an unsuspecting public for their entertainment. You are not now, nor have you ever been, a member or a supporter the Abercrombie & Fitch Tigers East New York football club.

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Jun 12 1:04 pm
Here it is, reader: the end of the line. The most logical, inevitable extension of young America’s insatiable lust for vintage T-shirts and the soft credibility they bestow on the wearer. You are not now, nor have you ever been, a member or a supporter the Go Abercrombie & Fitch Tigers East New York football club. Fair enough — I never piloted a steamboat, personally. But, of course, there is no Go Abercrombie & Fitch Tigers East New York football club in the first place (and even if there was, you are too poor and too “ethnic” to be affiliated with it). Warns Wikipedia: “All of Abercrombie & Fitch Co.’s spin-off brands have an accompanying fictional background.” This T-shirt costs $30.00. That makes it, in the purest sense of the word, the most ironic T-shirt we have featured all week. S. 12th’s weeklong coverage of the ironic T-shirts of the 1990s is over. Do you think we learned anything?

Here it is, reader: the end of the line. The most logical, inevitable extension of young America’s insatiable lust for vintage T-shirts and the soft credibility they bestow on the wearer. You are not now, nor have you ever been, a member or a supporter the Go Abercrombie & Fitch Tigers East New York football club.

Fair enough — I never piloted a steamboat, personally. But, of course, there is no Go Abercrombie & Fitch Tigers East New York football club in the first place (and even if there was, you are too poor and too “ethnic” to be affiliated with it). Warns Wikipedia: “All of Abercrombie & Fitch Co.’s spin-off brands have an accompanying fictional background.”

This T-shirt costs $30.00. That makes it, in the purest sense of the word, the most ironic T-shirt we have featured all week.

S. 12th’s weeklong coverage of the ironic T-shirts of the 1990s is over. Do you think we learned anything?

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Jun 12 11:44 am
Ironic T-shirts of the 1990s: A Dissenting View, by James V. Lindsay. From the S. 12th inbox, a (slightly but not entirely tongue-in-cheek) example of the use of T-shirts as a grunge-era ideal of sincerity:  Attached you’ll find a prime example of the type of message that I would routinely promote in the 90’s through the wearing of T-shirts.  This particular shirt, while not second-hand, was, at the time, intended to be a damning indictment of corporate America’s greedheads and their practice of taxing an unsuspecting public for their entertainment via the injustice known as the service charge. You see, the band you maligned in your original post, Pearl Jam, started a campaign to oust these avaricious corporate overseers and give the music back to the people. That T-shirt and I were instruments of that campaign and purveyors of that message. … And if you’d like to see how that campaign against those faceless corporate bosses worked out, buy a ticket for a concert on TicketMaster.com, then pay the $3 fee to print it out on your own printer. Bastards. S. 12th’s weeklong coverage of the ironic T-shirts of the 1990s spoke in class today.

Ironic T-shirts of the 1990s: A Dissenting View, by James V. Lindsay.

From the S. 12th inbox, a (slightly but not entirely tongue-in-cheek) example of the use of T-shirts as a grunge-era ideal of sincerity: 

Attached you’ll find a prime example of the type of message that I would routinely promote in the 90’s through the wearing of T-shirts.  This particular shirt, while not second-hand, was, at the time, intended to be a damning indictment of corporate America’s greedheads and their practice of taxing an unsuspecting public for their entertainment via the injustice known as the service charge. You see, the band you maligned in your original post, Pearl Jam, started a campaign to oust these avaricious corporate overseers and give the music back to the people. That T-shirt and I were instruments of that campaign and purveyors of that message.

… And if you’d like to see how that campaign against those faceless corporate bosses worked out, buy a ticket for a concert on TicketMaster.com, then pay the $3 fee to print it out on your own printer. Bastards.

S. 12th’s weeklong coverage of the ironic T-shirts of the 1990s spoke in class today.

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Jun 12 10:21 am

Ironic T-shirts of the 1990s: Mumblelard.

I have enjoyed the notebook scrawling stage of thinking about t-shirts.  It does seem to lead somewhere interesting.  Unfortunately, it has come to my attention that I might not really know if I ever wore an ironic t-shirt. I am not confident that I even know what that means.

My parents didn’t give me any measurable amount of money after I left home at seventeen. I shopped at thrift stores because I could not afford to buy clothes anywhere else, but also because I could get perfectly serviceable clothes there.  Extra cash would have been used for alcohol and drugs and used books anyway. I could buy almost two liters of cheap bourbon or more than a dozen used books for the price of a new bought t-shirt.

My main criteria for t-shirts was texture with a secondary attention to color (purple is buoyant, sometimes overwhelming, blue is soothing and allows clear thinking, navy blue that has faded to that almost purple color is an ideal compromise, etc.).  Rough textures on skin are distracting and I needed something that was the right kind of soft to go between my skin and the warm but scratchy wool sweaters required by central Ohio fall, winter and spring weather. (I could not wear most flannel shirts because I have a hard time parsing plaids.  My mind would unpleasantly spin all day on the relationship between the big and little squares or the thick and thin lines, even if I never looked at the shirt.)

These t-shirts that I bought at thrift stores frequently came with images and words on them, but most of the time they were covered up by a sweater or jacket. One t-shirt, as an example, advertised a shipping company with a raven for its logo.  Even when no one else could see it, I would amuse myself with stories about the raven pilfering the goods in his care.  I would think about what the aboriginal inhabitants of Ohio thought about ravens.  I would imagine a cave of shiny things the raven had stolen off of trucks loaded with strange treasures.  The raven on that t-shirt was a point that connected many other points and tied me into the stories of the world.  Maybe I wanted to be more like the raven.  Maybe that was part of it too.

Some mirror neuron deficiency prevented me from ever wondering what other people thought of this t-shirt. I never told anybody these stories out loud.  I wasn’t trying to be obscure or coy or smugly enjoying my secret knowledge of a deep meaning. I wanted to be connected to people through these stories. I just assumed that anybody who saw it was telling themselves stories about ravens. Some people have told me since that this is not how it works, but I don’t really believe them.

I don’t know what the surface meaning of a shipping company t-shirt is, so I don’t know if I was subverting it. If I created a shipping company, gave it an raven for its logo, and sent shirts out into the world, I would assume that they would be spawning thoughts of tricky ravens, messengers, porters and portents most of the time, and only occasionally spark the thought that this might be a good company for my shipping needs. In retrospect, I guess I may have been repurposing the images on this t-shirt, but if you had asked me then I would have told you I was purposing it.

Mumblelard lives in a house with Floyd, Finn and Fallie. Read more here, and also here.

S. 12th’s weeklong coverage of the ironic thift store T-shirts of the 1990s is winding down.

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Jun 12 8:57 am
Minneapolis writer and comedian Maggie Sandford, at home in Seattle at age 15 in 1998. A great twist to the formula — the T-shirt (in this case, featuring Jefferson Starship) doesn’t stand alone, but is instead incorporated seamlessly into a totally awesome Tank Girl costume. I [heart] S. 12th’s weeklong coverage of the ironic T-shirts of the 1990s.

Minneapolis writer and comedian Maggie Sandford, at home in Seattle at age 15 in 1998. A great twist to the formula — the T-shirt (in this case, featuring Jefferson Starship) doesn’t stand alone, but is instead incorporated seamlessly into a totally awesome Tank Girl costume.

I [heart] S. 12th’s weeklong coverage of the ironic T-shirts of the 1990s.

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Jun 11 1:22 pm
Your correspondent as a young man at the dawn of the 21st Century. I am wearing a “Steamboat Days ‘98” T-shirt from River Valley Middle School (an institution I have never attended, nor had ever heard of prior to the purchase of the shirt at a Goodwill store). The handsome fellow to the right, a musician named Richard presently living in the Bay Area, is wearing Calvin Klein (a reasonably funny joke if you know Richard). I am currently 29 years old. I am fairly certain that, having been awarded my high school degree in 1998, mine is among the last graduating class to embrace the ironic T-shirt as a day-to-day practice. I am right on the cusp. I am barely there. Other day-to-day practices that were falling out of mass acceptance around the time this photo was snapped: making zines, the wearing of cardigans, mixtapes made on 90-minute cassettes, Buddy Holly and/or cat-eye glasses, mail-ordering 45s directly from the record label, respect for Evan Dando. These are things I did but only barely remember; these were being gradually replaced by Livejournals, DFA recordings, iPods, Conor Oberst and skinny jeans by the time I achieved manhood (or some semblance thereof). The former are all things that the older men I admired and the older women I secretly loved trafficked in. All of these men and women, virtually without exception, wore T-shirts that bore slogans that they clearly had no affiliation with. S. 12th’s unending weeklong coverage of the ironic T-shirts of the 1990s is unstoppable!

Your correspondent as a young man at the dawn of the 21st Century.

I am wearing a “Steamboat Days ‘98” T-shirt from River Valley Middle School (an institution I have never attended, nor had ever heard of prior to the purchase of the shirt at a Goodwill store). The handsome fellow to the right, a musician named Richard presently living in the Bay Area, is wearing Calvin Klein (a reasonably funny joke if you know Richard).

I am currently 29 years old. I am fairly certain that, having been awarded my high school degree in 1998, mine is among the last graduating class to embrace the ironic T-shirt as a day-to-day practice. I am right on the cusp. I am barely there.

Other day-to-day practices that were falling out of mass acceptance around the time this photo was snapped: making zines, the wearing of cardigans, mixtapes made on 90-minute cassettes, Buddy Holly and/or cat-eye glasses, mail-ordering 45s directly from the record label, respect for Evan Dando.

These are things I did but only barely remember; these were being gradually replaced by Livejournals, DFA recordings, iPods, Conor Oberst and skinny jeans by the time I achieved manhood (or some semblance thereof). The former are all things that the older men I admired and the older women I secretly loved trafficked in. All of these men and women, virtually without exception, wore T-shirts that bore slogans that they clearly had no affiliation with.

S. 12th’s unending weeklong coverage of the ironic T-shirts of the 1990s is unstoppable!

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Tagged as: Ironic T-Shirts of the 1990s
Jun 11 9:28 am
One of the most enjoyable books I encountered this year was Leanne Shapton’s Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry. This is a novel written in the form of an auction catalog (and, regular readers will recall, soon to be a movie starring Brad Pitt!). The book dispassionately tracks, as a catalog would, the possessions that a pair of sweet, occasionally insufferable, and ultimately doomed young New Yorkers accumulate over the course of their relationship. It’s a book that cuts very close to home; it prompts you to mentally compile a similar personal catalog of the gifts, joint purchases and reciepts from your own relationships, and you realize, with some shock, how eerily similar they all are to what is pictured in Shapton’s book. In fact, there are quite a few hilarious oh, urban livin’! inside jokes you’ll be able to breathlessly explain to your uncomprehending kids forty years from now — why giving or recieving a romantic mix CD with Usher, Bjork and Belle and Sebastian on it is so funny, for example. One of the best of these in-jokes is a collection of T-shirts that Hal, the male half of the relationship, has owned (partially pictured above). The story takes place in 2006 and 2007, but Hal is in his mid- to late-thirties, a man whose sartorial tastes were forged in the flames of the 1990s. So his T-shirt collection as pictured is a pitch perfect assemblage of the sort of T-shirts that most every male who is currently between the ages of, say, 30 and 40 has worn every weekend for the last twenty years — “I’m Proud to be a Filipino,” “Baxter Fishing Equipment 1990,” a shirt commemorating Glenville (Ohio) High School’s track championships, “Jay Jay’s Lounge,” Vogue, “St. Paul’s Crusaders.” Like most else in the book, it’s spot on. S. 12th’s seemingly endless weeklong coverage of the ironic T-shirts of the 1990s presses on fearlessly.

One of the most enjoyable books I encountered this year was Leanne Shapton’s Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry. This is a novel written in the form of an auction catalog (and, regular readers will recall, soon to be a movie starring Brad Pitt!). The book dispassionately tracks, as a catalog would, the possessions that a pair of sweet, occasionally insufferable, and ultimately doomed young New Yorkers accumulate over the course of their relationship.

It’s a book that cuts very close to home; it prompts you to mentally compile a similar personal catalog of the gifts, joint purchases and reciepts from your own relationships, and you realize, with some shock, how eerily similar they all are to what is pictured in Shapton’s book.

In fact, there are quite a few hilarious oh, urban livin’! inside jokes you’ll be able to breathlessly explain to your uncomprehending kids forty years from now — why giving or recieving a romantic mix CD with Usher, Bjork and Belle and Sebastian on it is so funny, for example.

One of the best of these in-jokes is a collection of T-shirts that Hal, the male half of the relationship, has owned (partially pictured above). The story takes place in 2006 and 2007, but Hal is in his mid- to late-thirties, a man whose sartorial tastes were forged in the flames of the 1990s. So his T-shirt collection as pictured is a pitch perfect assemblage of the sort of T-shirts that most every male who is currently between the ages of, say, 30 and 40 has worn every weekend for the last twenty years — “I’m Proud to be a Filipino,” “Baxter Fishing Equipment 1990,” a shirt commemorating Glenville (Ohio) High School’s track championships, “Jay Jay’s Lounge,” Vogue, “St. Paul’s Crusaders.” Like most else in the book, it’s spot on.

S. 12th’s seemingly endless weeklong coverage of the ironic T-shirts of the 1990s presses on fearlessly.

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Jun 10 3:03 pm

Ironic T-shirts of the 1990s: Katie Beach.

I’m not sure when the “Ironic Tee Shirt” trend passed into my consciousness, but it was probably sometime in my early college years. I went to Catholic school, which meant uniforms, and the opportunity for quirky self-actualization through smart-ass clothing was limited. To say I missed the boat on the trends of my generation is understatement—throughout the ’90s I was distracted by ’70s rock and roll, “Nick at Nite” programming and macramé projects.
 
But when I finally did become savvy (read: painfully self-aware and desperate to show off my “cleverness”), I consumed all the tongue-in-cheek thrift store rags I could get my newly-hip little hands on: everything from Dollywood theme park tees to Van Halen tour shirts to ones with my old grade school logo on them. I loved my “CLASS OF ‘80” tee, a tan shirt with the letters in sparkly rainbow vinyl (partly because when I wore it with a cardigan the “CL” would get covered up and my shirt would proclaim that I was/am/had the “ASS OF ‘80”). Also, my “hilarious” Hanson tee shirt, or any goofy castaway clearly meant for a little boy. My favorite of these was a bright orange one with a picture of this savage-looking football player on it, punching his fist through a helmet (!), with “D-E-F-E-N-S-E” spelled out in block letters. As a girl, the cheekiness of my tee shirts could take on another layer of density, making the waters ever murkier for the casual observer. I considered, but ultimately shied away from bringing race into the mix when I saw a shirt stating that there “Ain’t Nothin’ Like a Sista.”
 
I still get vaguely excited about “funny” tee shirts, especially when I think of various catchphrases that could be co-opted into iron-on lettered one-liners, but I generally don’t follow through. I would rather avoid the attention that a snarky shirt will get you; who wants to provide a ready-made icebreaker for the kind of weirdos whose courage is plucked up by a vintage Kiss tee shirt? These days I go for plain, unremarkable clothes: no logos or other identifying marks because, frankly, I don’t see any advantage in giving strangers an excuse to stare at my boobs.

Katie Beach is a librarian and artist based in Louisville, Kentucky. You can read her Tumblr here.

S. 12th’s exclusive weeklong coverage of the ironic T-shirts of the 1990s continues!

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Jun 10 11:20 am
From Daniel Clowes’ “The Curtain of Sanity,” published in Eightball in 1991. This piece was a typically Clowesian misanthropic catalog of ”five positive indicators that say ‘Yes! He/she [person on the street] is a bona fide nut!’” What’s interesting is that although Clowes’ graphic work is strongly identified with 1990s alternative subculture (he designed some of the labels for OK Soda, after all), he seems a little bit behind the times on this one. By 1991, you can bet that Bob Nastonovich already had a closet full of “T-shirts bearing slogans that the wearer clearly has no affiliation with,” and most of young America was not far behind him.  Far from being a sign of “bona fide nut” status, a 1983 Vassar debate team T-shirt in 1991 would have commanded a great deal of respect in certain circles. By 1999, such a T-shirt, had I owned one, would have guaranteed me a  date for whatever the weekend’s big show was, and probably gotten my band written up in the local alt-weekly to boot. S. 12th’s exclusive weeklong coverage of the ironic T-shirts of the 1990s continues.

From Daniel Clowes’ “The Curtain of Sanity,” published in Eightball in 1991.

This piece was a typically Clowesian misanthropic catalog of ”five positive indicators that say ‘Yes! He/she [person on the street] is a bona fide nut!’”

What’s interesting is that although Clowes’ graphic work is strongly identified with 1990s alternative subculture (he designed some of the labels for OK Soda, after all), he seems a little bit behind the times on this one. By 1991, you can bet that Bob Nastonovich already had a closet full of “T-shirts bearing slogans that the wearer clearly has no affiliation with,” and most of young America was not far behind him. 

Far from being a sign of “bona fide nut” status, a 1983 Vassar debate team T-shirt in 1991 would have commanded a great deal of respect in certain circles.

By 1999, such a T-shirt, had I owned one, would have guaranteed me a  date for whatever the weekend’s big show was, and probably gotten my band written up in the local alt-weekly to boot.

S. 12th’s exclusive weeklong coverage of the ironic T-shirts of the 1990s continues.

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Jun 10 9:15 am

Ironic T-shirts of the 1990s: Paul D. Dickinson.

Mustard, Green, Plaid and Aqua: Where Did All the Cool Stuff Go?

T-shirts are a good starting point for this — in a way, T-shirts used to be the mark of total authenticity. You went to the Black Sabbath concert, you bought the shirt, and you wore it with pride to high school the next day. Remember “my mom went to Florida and all I got was this T-shirt”? Yes, even mom had to go Florida to get that stupid shirt. To take it to the absurd end: you actually had to go to Harvard to get a Harvard shirt.

Well, life isn’t so simple anymore. The 18th Century technology of SHOWING UP SOMEPLACE has truly been replaced by…by what, indeed?

It used to be a shameful act to shop at a thrift store, to wear the cast-offs of others.  We did it at first because it was PUNK — the clothes were mustard and green and plaid and goofy. Super-dorked out high water pants.  Musty cardigans and yes, T-shirts from years ago that made no sense. And the punker chicks did it, too. The joke used to be that you couldn’t tell who was at the bus stop from a distance — an old lady or a punk girl — because they were wearing all the old lady’s clothes.  But there isn’t enough time in this century, or enough gigabytes in the first or second world to go into how sexy those girls made those old lady togs. Oh, to fondle a breast under a vintage dress in a dark basement, the Clash on a boombox…

Yet it turned out, over time, that all the cool shit — records, 8 tracks, couches, and velvet paintings — anything you would really want was in the thrift stores. As a disclaimer, let it be known that I am not your regular consumer. In fact, other than underwear, socks, this beautiful Macbook, airline tickets and the occasional shopping spree in NYC Chinatown, I don’t buy anything new. I have been getting stuff at thrift stores and flipping it for cash for years. Along the way, I find some items for myself. Yet I would never admit this to anyone at the thrift store, like so many dumbasses, or tell anyone else HOW to do it. Leave the hustling to the hustlers. We don’t fit in with regular folks, we NEED to do this.

The sad fact is that thrift stores have be ruined. You really can’t SCORE anymore because there are legions of eBay geeks with scanners and cell phones who have turned this fine art, perfected by alabaster-complexioned Punker babes, into a mindless chore. The cover was blown long ago. Goodwill now sells items on its own website, and The New York Times writes articles about how to decorate your upper West Side co-op in thrift store chic.  Indeed, this is the cycle of American culture — everything cool gets eventually eroded into meaningless pap by the squares.

And so our young hero Andy, in the year of our Lord 1992, is awakened to the fact the jock, dillweed and nimrod population of Louisville has co-opted his emerging style — without any irony or intellectual delight.  But what gives me hope in all this?  The simple fact, that Andy’s style, perhaps mutated, perhaps ironic beyond all belief, has mightily survived after all.

Paul D. Dickinson is a poet and musician based in St. Paul, Minnesota. He was the co-founder of Speedboat Gallery, which hosted early shows by Bikini Kill and Green Day. Dickinson is also the author of the forthcoming automotive memoir Junker Dreams.

S. 12th’s exclusive weeklong coverage of the ironic T-shirts of the 1990s continues.

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Tagged as: Ironic T-Shirts of the 1990s Things were better in the 1970s.