Just a quicky post: I’ve started another blog called T-Shirt Empire where I can throw short articles on cool t-shirts I’ve found. There’ll be a lot of linking back and forth between the two blogs so if you come here first, you’ll always know what’s happening over there.
I plan to keep up both blogs. Plans are good; whether they’re carried out is another matter. But a post about a t-shirt takes maybe 20 minutes to write, so it may work out. And if it does take more than 20 minutes to write, I might as well post it over here on Secret Santa Cruz.
Anyway, check it out: http://tee-shirt-empire.tumblr.com . It’s over on Tumblr, the social networking platform for young people who don’t read much. Lots and lots of pictures. Don’t miss t-shirts for Team Dead Cat, “A Celebration of Indonesian Scooter Culture” (I had not idea), and various tradesmen who can’t stop themselvs from making penis jokes on their company t-shirts. I mean, there is a reason I enjoy this hobby. Even though I’ve come to realize that it’s a bizarre, mutant form of stamp collecting.
Indo Scooter Culture….fascinating look into a culture.
How many shirts do you have in your collection?
~Gnome
I don’t have an exact count, but somewhere in the vicinity of 400-500. I weeded some of them out a couple of months ago.
It is interesting to see how a culture takes artifacts or ideas from another culture and makes them its own. The western world does it all the time; we’re used to it. We’re not so used to others doing it with our material/social constructs.
My t-shirt collection’s growth rate is slowing; I am running out of room, true. But as the shirts are sort of a library of wearable social documents, I don’t need to keep acquiring shirts of a type that are already well-represented in my collection. For example, about every Harley dealer on the planet sells a t-shirt representing its business; the tees can be beautiful, but they’re always very straightforward: a picture of a Harley, its riders, and where they ride (the locale of the shop). That’s it. You only need two or three of those shirts to make the point. Although I recently acquired a new one because it wasn’t like any other Harley shop t-shirt: a horse’s head covered in overlapping plates of armor, for an outfit called Iron Steed Harley Davidson. An actual metaphor.