tshirts

i cleaned out my tshirt drawer to make room for sweaters and socks that were in a different drawer to make room for towels in the former sock drawer (we don't have a linen closet). it made me think about tshirts. writing about tshirts helped me remember more about tshirts. this is a blog post about my personal relationship to/with tshirts throughout my life. i've enjoyed seeing this post get bigger, as i write it.

Age 0-10
i only wore tshirts that my parents or family bought for me, or which were free from sports events, or something. i remember wearing shirts of every color, including white. i think, in the 1990s, it was more common/stylish for tshirts to have large logos on the back, and small logos on the front, as opposed to today, where i feel like most 'stylish' shirts only have logos on the front. i remember having a large (on my body) green shirt with some large logo on the back and a small logo on the front. in photographs of me as a child, my tshirts look really baggy, i think because i wore many 'free' tshirts from events, like soccer tournaments, which came in limited sizes. i do not remember having a favorite tshirt.

Late Elementary/Middle School

i first started caring about tshirts around, i think, the age of 11, when i got into skateboarding, thanks to the popularity of the tony hawks' pro skater videogame. this level of interest in tshirt was based on trying to look like a skateboarder and buying shirts that had interesting designs or logos from brands that i (arbitrarily) aligned myself with based on looking at the CCS catalog probably every day for a long period of time. i remember liking Zero, Birdhouse, and Spitfire brands. i think I also owned Osiris shoes. i was thin and i mostly wore baggy tshirts of various dark colors with logos. sometimes i wore long-sleeved tshirts underneath. i did actually skateboard, but i was never good. i was probably the worst out of all my friends.

around the age of 12, i started getting fat, and i learned about how black tshirts were better at hiding the shape of my torso than other colors. i pivoted to mostly wearing black skateboard tshirts. my favorite was a Zero branded shirt, which i liked because of its association with the smashing pumpkins. i wore it to a physical with my doctor at some point and was asked very delicate questions about my mental health, whether i 'often felt like a zero,' etc. my parents tell this story fondly, in a 'such a rascal' way, and recalling how they told the doctor, on my behalf, 'no, it's just a skateboard company logo,'  like to insinuate that the doctor was an idiot. but, what i have since come to accept, and maybe they haven't, is that i did actually feel bad most of the time, and the Zero iconography did, i felt, represent my outlook on life, to some degree.

Jr High School

i remember my mom getting frustrated that i only owned black tshirts around the time i was 13 and offered to let me pick out and buy several tshirts from the internet. i was less into skateboarding by this point and become interested more in bands. i remember buying a bright yellow tshirt for the band LIARS which i wore exactly once. i remember, still, how it felt, seeing myself look really bad in such a bright yellow tshirt. i remember feeling frustrated that i hadn't thought about what it would look like to wear a bright colored shirt over my torso. it was printed on an american apparel tshirt and had a kite-based design. i remember my mom expressing frustration with me about my tshirts with some amount of frequency, i think, in retrospect, because i would wear black tshirts in the summer, and the summer is usually when we'd visit extended family, and my mom is very sensitive to being 'judged' as a parent by our extended family, i think. around this time i started wearing long-sleeved shirts (button downs, hoodies, and track jackets) almost all the time, including in the summer. i remember at some summer camp it becoming a 'thing' that i wore a track jacket so much, which i justified because i was doing the 'movie making' track of the camp, and spent most of the week indoors, where it was air conditioned.

High School

in early high school, i remember wearing black tshirts of various sizes. i remember having a black tshirt from the high school drama department, for some reason, that was too tight, but i wore it all the time. i had a bright eyes tshirt from their digital ash tour (glow in the dark ink on black) i also had a brown tshirt with a cartoon on it from toothpaste for dinner. at some later point in high school Threadless became popular and i spent my own money on $10 tshirts, including some that were dark blue or dark green. i still mostly wore black tshirts, at some point wearing a generic skateboarding tshirt (possible tony hawk brand) from Kohl's, but inside out. most of my clothing during my sophomore to senior year, i think, was tight fitting, including the tshirts, which on retrospect was counterproductive re: wearing black to hide my body shape. i remember wearing tight pants often and overhearing my friend comment to another friend that my pants were too tight, at some point, because he had to sit next to me in class. i also owned a pair of tight pink khakis i bought from a goodwill, because i liked The Unicorns at the time, but i'm pretty sure my mom threw them out (my siblings and i each have one story of our mom throwing out an article of clothing she deemed unacceptable - mine were the pink pants, i assume because of an appeal to gender/sexuality norms).

by my senior year of high school i had lost weight and had grown a beard and so felt more confident in my appearance. i remember it was around this time that i became more aware of american apparel and how it was the default shirt for band merchandise. i was in a band and had a lot of band shirts from bands we'd play with, or from concerts i would go to, or which sometimes i would order online. i remember wearing a baby blue modest mouse tshirt and a size small, black, modest mouse cotton track jacket a lot, for example, and i remember a dark blue tshirt for a band called The Nobility, who we played with once, and a brown Toads and Mice shirt. i remember giving my size-large tshirts that didn't fit me anymore to my bandmate josh, who later died i think ~5 years after the band broke up. i remember, at the time, being surprised that he wanted to wear my old shirts, because i remember him otherwise being very aggressive/dismissive toward/about me in a general sense.

around/after this time i found out about etsy and other websites where people sold screenprinted tshirts. one was a website called reckon.ws, which sold shirts with pictures of musicians and authors on american apparel tshirts. from them i purchased a black shirt with Nico printed on it, and some others, but the Nico shirt fit the best and was my favorite. i also purchased shirts from an etsy shop called "blackflag317", i think, which had anticapitalist and anti-imperial slogans/images on them, including "resist, don't enlist" (on olive green), "ningún ser humano es ilegal" (on slate), and "capitalism kills" (on red).  i felt good about my body and wore tshirts without longersleeved shirts over top during this period.

i find it interesting that 'high school' is the longest section in this post.

College
my friends and i considered getting into screenprinting our own shirts, inspired by these other stores, which was mostly a failure, but in the process we found a website that let you 'bulk order' american apparel tshirts for bulk prices, but for any number of shirts. this meant i was able to buy orders of 2-3 american apparel tshirts for ~$6 each before shipping. for most of my first year of college, i wore these $6 american apparel tshirts and the above shirts from etsy. i mostly had blank black, grey (slate), green (forest), and blue vnecks (blue was my least favorite). my friend james, in my head, from this time period, exclusively wore pastel american apparel (deep) vneck tshirts and nice pants. there was an american apparel store near where i went to college but i don't remember ever buying anything from there, refusing to pay the price the charged, after having purchased so many $6 shirts on the most-likely illegal website.

at some point i moved away from blank tshirts and wore other shirts from etsy with art/slogans on them again, or shirts i'd buy secondhand, including a black REM tour shirt (i do not listen to REM) and a forest green gilden shirt from etsy that was printed with some kind of bold futurist slogan about nature, which i wore ironically. i think this coincided with american apparel becoming less fashionable. i remember people using 'alternative apparel' for a while, for band tshirts, and then most moved to making shirts on the shitty thick gilden tshirts. i regret not buying more shirts from before this change to gilden (however, i have put on weight, and would not fit in any of the shirts i used to own, i think, anyway).

Grad School
i started buying blank vneck tshirts from old navy, which you could/can get for ~$6. i also attempted to 'dress nicer' for a while, wearing button-ups, and sometimes a sweater vest. during this period, most of my tshirts were from old navy or were free shirts from the annual career fair. i would go to the career fair simply to get free tshirts and other free, 'useful' things, sunglasses. most of the tshirts were for technology companies or had some kind of computer programming references on them that i didn't understand/care about. people in public would try to talk to me about the references and i'd say i got the shirt for free from the career fair and didn't understand the references. i also owned a pair of yellow snapchat branded sunglasses which i wore sometimes, a some other, less colorful sunglasses.

eventually i stopped giving a shit about my appearance/self and stopped dressing nicer, and started wearing just tshirts or tshirts with flannel shirts. i believe this coincided with me becoming more depressed/accepting my depression. i also started wearing/buying more black band tshirts that usually came with record preorders, i think, or which were gifts from my friend brent, who lived in seattle and would go to concerts i recommended to him, and he'd buy me merch to mail me. i remember having a Whirr tshirt and 2-3 Nothing tshirts, and blank old navy vnecks. i remember the bold, dark band shirts felt like the reflected my inner turmoil or outlook on life, in a juvenile, but therapeutic, maybe, way.

i do not have any of the technology company tshirts from this time period anymore, or any of the (black) band tshirts i did splurge on, or get as gifts, mostly because i have since gained weight, or lost the shirts.

Present Day

today, my tshirt collection is, again, mostly black. i briefly experimented with wearing lighter-colored vnecks from old navy, such as a blue striped one and a cream/grey one, but when looking at pictures of myself wearing them, i feel grossed out/ashamed. they are now worn by my wife as pajama shirts.

i do own and wear one cream-colored shirt, because it was a gift and i like the design - it is from Chop Suey Books in Richmond, VA (and it is a vneck - i have few vnecks anymore, since old navy changed their tshirt sizing some years ago), but i try not to look at myself in the mirror when i wear it. i have also moved back to wearing hoodies/over shirts, specifically, now, flannel shirts, when the weather permits, which is maybe 8 months of the year. most of my tshirts are band tshirts on bad quality material (gilden) and/or bad cuts (tight crew necks), but i also still wear a tyrant books shirt (nicer quality) and hobart buffalo skulls shirt (good quality, kind of formfitting) with regularity. i own 3 horse jumper of love tshirts but only wear one regularly. i also have an orange Snowing shirt and a light blue/acidwash(?) Kindling shirt with a blue logo on it that my toddler likes to point at and say "blue". i wear maybe 5-6 shirts on a consistent rotation, the others feeling too thick and uncomfortable to wear frequently, including the bootleg tyrant books shirt from steve anwyll (canadian tshirt crewneck neck holes are noticeably tighter than american tshirt crewneck neck holes, in my experience, based on buying ~3 shirts from canada, including my 'no future' tshirt from choplogik, which this blog is named after). i think maybe the majority of my tshirts i own have dogs on them, maybe ~4 dog tshirts, 2 cat shirts, one buffalo shirt, and one lemur shirt. the hjol shirt i like also has a mouse on it i think.

most of my tshirts have holes near the front bottom hem due to my belt buckle, i think, which has a sharp square corner. most of my shirts are also faded and in some cases 'lobsided'.  i am currently wearing my tyrant books tshirt. i just looked at myself in the mirror and i look like total shit.

i briefly googled 'what happened to american apparel' and learned that they went into bankruptcy twice, and there were a lot of issues/accusations about their founder/ceo/?? being a misogynist republican. i don't know anyone who wears or talks about american apparel. i don't have any american apparel shirts left. i held onto my Nico shirt for sentimental reasons, but it has a pretty bad hole in the armpit, and is two sizes too small.

i just wondered if tao lin's Joy Williams tshirt was from reckon.ws. that seems likely. this is the shirt:

Tao Lin's Joy Williams Shirt. I think this is 'eggplant' color from american apparel

the blackflag317 etsy shop no longer exists. i saw someone make a joke(?) about threadless on twitter recently, but haven't looked at their shirts in ~10 years, which i think was maybe the joke.

i have also spent some unknown amount of time uselessly looking for nice quality band tshirts printed on vnecks. if you have any recommendations on cool tshirts printed on black vnecks, please contact me. thank you.