One day when I was a kid in the late 90s, I discovered that clothes with slogans on are 200% better than those without.
Suddenly, choosing clothes was way more fun - I now had the chance to amuse my friends and offend adults without even opening my mouth. As I’ve grown up, I’ve continued to love a good T-shirt tagline, and I always look out for them in vintage stores. I mean...
What could be better than seeing the crazy prints and often questionable quotes that people felt compelled to put on a T-shirt all those years ago, and wearing them today in homage to the beautiful weirdos who created them?
Slogan tees: A cropped history (sorry not sorry)
Graphics on T-shirts really took off in the 1960s when screen printing techniques became more advanced. A plain piece of clothing was transformed into a place to shout something into the crowd, and it became a way to express everything from who you are and what you believe in, to the bands, brands or political movements you support or ridicule.
Zoom forward to the 1990s...
With this rich, three-decade history of slogan T-shirts behind us, we children of the nineties still had a lot left to shout about. We had bolder prints and better ways to shout even louder, and best of all? We weren't scared to shout something dumb.
For my own part, childhood me was fully on board with this. I’d learned an important lesson: that clothing can do the talking for you. It can be a conversation-starter - or stopper. But most importantly?
The 90s taught me that slogan T-shirts didn’t need to ‘say’ anything worthwhile to be great - hey, they didn't even need to make sense!
This was handy because, well, let's just say I was less likely to wear a T-shirt proffering grand statements about the meaning of life (popular in the 1970s), and more likely to be sporting that true classic, 'I'm with stupid'.
A childhood in T-shirts
So I saw the 90s through in a series of varyingly brilliant and hideous slogan T-shirts.
Highlights include one that said ‘Scratch and Sniff’ with a picture of three milkshakes that, if you scratched and sniffed (who’d have guessed), smelt like milkshake. Although an amazing feat of engineering, (or so all my friends thought) this interactive feature wasn’t always ideal as you can imagine. Plus, the more it went through the wash, the more this T-shirt’s milkshake smelt like the yard.
Another favourite was a red top that simply had the word ‘Top’ on it. I know right, existential crisis time. But my clothing attempting self- awareness, or breaking the fourth wall, or whatever its undoubtedly dubious intentions were, didn’t seem to trouble me too much as a ten-year-old, and I wore ‘Top’ all the time.
Then there was a black T-shirt with the Mitsubishi logo on, but with ‘Mesobitchy’ written underneath. Mind-blowingly clever, right…? Well to me as a kid woefully underexposed to puns, yes it was. The reason for this could well have been that this particular T-shirt belonged to my older sister, and thanks to the usual teenage mood swings, it was a gratifyingly accurate description that filled young me with glee.
Ahh, simple days.
All this reminiscing got me thinking;
What are the very best slogan T-shirts out there in the wild and in our wardrobes?
Which ones should probably never have seen the light of day, but we’re so glad they did?
And could it be true (as I strongly suspect it is) that the 1990s are to blame for 99% of the best and worst slogan T-shirts out there?
My search for proof continues…
Credits:
Created with images by Guillaume Bleyer - "For more pictures: instagram.com/_blrguillaume | contact: bleyerguillaume@gmail.com " • Malcolm Lightbody - "Seen at Camden Lock, London" • Aaron Weiss - "Fun shirt we shot on our walk around Williamsburg at sunset" • Louis Hansel @shotsoflouis - "untitled image" • Grace Madeline - "untitled image"