Not a promising starting image is it, but my
Curve shirt got me thinking. 'Ou sont les t-shirts d'antan?', as Proust would have said if he'd had a decent record shop and a student loan in the heady days of the early-to-mid-1990s rather than some mouldy old biscuits and some unresolved 'issues'.
Band t-shirts were the staple of my wardrobe then: apart from some regrettable stripy hippy shirts, I expressed what passed for my identity through the medium of cheap XL tops stamped with the usually not very imaginative names of a string of mostly second-rate bands, in accordance with the rituals of my tribe. In some cases, the shirts have outlived the bands by over a decade: I have and still wear a particularly good
Gorky's Zygotic Mynci shirt depicting various beard styles (I shall take a picture for you tonight).
The collection is a reminder of youthful enthusiasms, of a social context, of various design cultures, but also - sadly - of the inexorable growth of my guts. At first I was thin (my diet was largely carrots), and wore tiny skinny-fit shirts. Then I got fat, and voluminous drapery was the order of the day… And yet I have so few of these shirts left, and so little enthusiasm for buying more. At the time, buying the t-shirt (official from within the gig venue if I had money, cheap rip-off from the pavement outside if I didn't) was compulsory, along with the 2 picture discs with postcards which was obviously superior to buying one 7" single or - spit - a
CD. Ugh. For some reason, all my anti-consumerist, anti-capitalist instincts were suspended whenever some cheap cotton promotional material hove into view.
They've virtually all gone now… my
Ash shirt (try
this blast of pop fun), the
Gene (
'Haunted By You') one, the skinny blue
Bluetones one with silver foil lettering (listen to
this), the font-tastic
Elastica top ('
2:1', oh yes), the pale-blue Belle and Sebastian 'Study at Stow' and
Tigermilk tops (try '
Electronic Renaissance'), the glaring
Stereolab T (check out '
K-Stars'), the
Super Furry Animals 'Fuzzy Logic' top and a very poor white one with the SFA logo on each nipple (you'll like
this one), the
Catatonia one ('
Sweet Catatonia'), and all the others I can't even remember now (help me out, eye-witnesses). I have a horrible suspicion about a
Levellers ('
Battle of the Beanfield') shirt and a
Manics fleece (long story involving Mogwai - who '
Fear Satan' - and rain: listen to '
La Tristessa Durera' instead). All I'm left with is a
Melt Banana (
here 'celebrating' 'White Christmas') one which I've never worn because alcohol misleadingly persuaded me at the stall that I wasn't a porky git, the Gorky's top and my gifted Curve one. And a big pile of nerd shirts: science puns, one with Shakespeare reading 'prose before hos', a few book-related ones including a beautiful raven made up of Poe's poem, and some fencing-related stuff. And one with the Back to the Future DeLorean crashing into the Tardis, of which I'm particularly proud.
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Are these things culturally significant? The internet says mostly no: I wish I'd taken pictures of these lost artefacts, because nobody else has. They were part of a culture, in which belonging was important, and it's a forgotten phase. It was fascinating to see high street clothing stores selling shirts for bands which buyers didn't listen to - Iron Maiden shirts suddenly became mainstream, for instance, as the band t-shirt became a signifier divorced from what it previously signified: belonging to an exclusive tribe, maintaining and developing individuality by being the same, and a host of other subtle meanings. Buying the shirt was a way to announce your sophistication, or your rejection of mainstream values. It was also a kind of education: the aesthetics of the shirt were often a way in to the art-school tastes many of the bands I liked had picked up.
Further reading: Wendy Fonarow's
Empire of Dirt: The Aesthetics and Rituals of British Indie Music and the fine
My Band T-Shirt Tumblr.
PS. Why was this mainly a male thing?
