I don’t know whether it’s January blues, recession woes or just having a bit of money in my pocket after Christmas, but I have been browsing T-shirts with a completely different agenda this past week. I wanted glamor.

Sadly, what I mostly found was tacky. People, sticking Swarovski crystals on things does not make them glamorous – it just makes them sparkly AND tacky.

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So this isn’t a cheap Tee and its designer certainly thinks a lot of himself. But if you can get past the self-congratulatory nature of the website “JoJo Remeny is an extremely Funky and Psychedelic English couture designer label for Funky people” etc, the t-shirts are worth looking at.

And although £40 seems like a lot of money for a T-shirt, when you think that these are really hand-made, they’re actually a bargain. This isn’t just another design screen-printed on a blank – these tops are actually hand-cut, hand-sewn, hand-dyed and hand-embroidered. Where else are you going to get that level of individuality for $80?

The website says Jojo’s designs are for people who are not afraid to wear color – that’s for sure. Nothing here is bland, but the designs are vibrant and this level of couture input for this low a price is really worth investing in.

Post by Kay whose New Year’s resolution is to buy less, wear more …

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Here’s some nice stuff from chargrilled, who can be a bit Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand in the old slogan department. Like a lot of Tee designers, they sail close to the wind. They proclaim that they sell offensive T-shirts, so it’s obviously something they pride themselves on, but quite often I don’t feel offended by their stuff, just a bit, bleah. Like when you hear a joke for the eighth time and you can remember when it was funny but it seems like a long time ago …

What I do like about chargrilled is for an extra couple of quid you can get your teeshirt sealed into a real tin, to be opened with a tin opener. That’s cool, and impresses your mates when you turn up for the evening in some skuzzy work clothes like you forget the plan, pull out your tin and tin opener and kit yourself out in front of them in a brand new T-shirt.

Post by Mikey whose New Year’s resolution is not to buy a T-shirt with a New Year’s resolution on it

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I’m very much loving lucha workshops right now, in part because their spelling is as dodgy as Mikey’s which is fun, and in part because they have this excellent weapons Tee, ideal for driving the family crazy at post-Christmas lunches that you’re forced to attend.

Mikey tells me that you would probably get arrested for wearing this T-shirt in the street in England, where there’s some kind of weird overreaction to any depiction of knives on teeshirts right now, but I don’t think you would, because there’s nothing gory about this: it’s got a sort of encyclopaedia illustration feel to it, which is charming in a somewhat disturbing way, like a stuffed animal with a cute face.

I like the way the weapons range from the Postal Service Special (death by rubber band, not to be confused with going postal, which is also there as death by sawn-off shotgun) through to a skillet (the downtrodden wife’s weapon of choice) the ice pick (spy kill tool 101) and a sling shot – very kewl. Nice too, that lucha print with water based inks on a form-fitting Tee that they say can be a real body-hugger so go up a size if you don’t like tighty tees. And at $20, this one’s a complete steal … as well as a textbook guide to murder.

Post by Kay who hates family at Christmas (or any other time of year)

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I’m p-o’d with Split Reason, for a very good reason. I wanted to tell you about a tee that I was tipped off about, the awesome sounding ‘Snake for President’. Yeah verily, I was keen to see it and blog it. But …

Where’s the eye patch? Duh?

So that’s crap. Can’t be a Snake Plissken T-shirt unless the patch is prominent, right?

Split Reason sort of redeem themselves with this retro Game Genie tee, but I’m not exactly thrilled to bits with them.

It’s not good to get people’s hopes up like that, and then let them down, not this close to Christmas. They’re on my naughty list now, I tell you.

Post by Mikey whose gruntle is very dissed by the eyepatch issue

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Not to be rude, it’s a tee limited to just a three letter word.

3 Letter Word claims to offer a whole new form of self expression – you choose your colour T-shirt, you choose your size and you choose three letters to go on the front. So instead of saying what the corporates want you to say (just do it, your country needs you, smile) you can say what you want, as long as it’s limited to the 3 letter rule.

It gets kind of addictive. 3 Letter say there are 1,238 official English words to choose from, and because you choose yours, it says what you want. Presumably you can choose complete gibberish too, and make people wonder. There’s no punctuation or symbology showing on the 3 Letter website’s own images, but I just had a lot of fun with the top row symbols and equals sign on my keyboard, so you must be able to do pretty well what you choose – I wonder if they print Cyrillic? Somebody must know, I guess.

At $20 for an American Apparel t shirt they are within the price range I’d call pretty reasonable and there’s endless pleasure to be had from working out how best to express yourself with just three letters.

Post by Kay, who thinks crosswords are cool. Sad but true.

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If you have to go to family parties for Crimbo (that’s Brit-slang for Christmas, for our American friends) and listen to your Mum’s favourite Christmas compilation CD with Slade and those kids singing about their Grandma and Jona Lewie, you might as well surrender to the horror.

Here’s a hoodie that brings back the full glory of Christmas past in Britain’s least tasteful decade, the 1980s.

Look at the glitter writing, think of the mullets, remember Mike Read presenting Top of the Pops like it was actually important. Wallow in the terrible fashion crimes that were committed. Cringe at the lip-synching performers and the muppets who made up the audience and thought they could dance. Sneer at the crap acts who made it to number one. Wear the hoodie with pride.

That said, it’s a nice design and you can always claim it’s an ironic statement about pop culture. Speaking of which Truffle Shuffle point out that their stuff is worn by Amy Winehouse and Justin Lee Collins, like it’s a good thing!

Post by Mikey who definitely cannot do the formation slosh. Really he can’t. Really …

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Mikey’s hiding out in South America, or skulking somewhere that’s got central heating, one or the other. Can’t blame him, this place is freakin’ freezing! It is definitely not T-shirt weather around my desk, I will tell you that.

So Christmas is creeping up, the banks are getting scare that we’re going to take all our money out and leave them abandoned, the retailers are scared that we’re not going to take any money out and leave them stranded with shelves of Christmas stock, and all that.

Enter Crywolf, a good name for a T-shirt company in these dire times. They are Toronto based and aim to produce affordable and wearable art by creating handmade, limited edition clothing. Some of it is beautiful, like this:

I like the quirkiness of their designs, the animal imagery (on t-shirts other than this one, although it does have a wolf mask on the partygoing female) is unusual and ranges from the cute to the distinctly eerie – I think you can tell that Rose and Steph are women creating clothing for women here, because there’s something about the way they place their designs on the tee that shows they are thinking about how women dress and move, not just shoving a graphic in the center and that’s it.

I also like the colourways they use, which are fresh and young looking – there’s something very Japanese about the styling here which appeals to me. It’s the kind of clothing you can imagine pulling on the morning after a heavy night and making you feel better about yourself. And as that’s the season that’s coming up, I recommend Crywolf to you. Get some for Christmas, make the banks miserable!

Post by Kay who wants a thermal t-shirt and she wants it now!

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We should have had one, shouldn’t we? With the teejunkie logo on it and a list of countries visited on the back. Aw.

Still, the last word falls to me (which doesn’t happen nearly often enough round here) and I’m going to say it in New Zealand.

Small country, famous for sheep, LOTR and um … sheep. Anyhoo, very nice place, nice people, nice climate, nice wine. Basically, it’s nice (but I’m guessing you’d worked that out) and actually produces some tees that epitomise niceness. This one’s found at Endemic, web-home of the niceness.

See? Nice. In fact, ‘nice’ could be a synonym for New Zealand, imo. Kinoo, the company behind this, make homeware (what’s that?) and baby apparel, which appears to be ‘nice’ for kiddie clothing. Sweet.

Love that kiwi though – flightless bird, the kiwi, and the national bird of ‘nice’. So it’s a patriot t-shirt too. Although only if you come from ‘nice’.

Post by Kay, who wonders if you get thrown out of NZ if you’re not nice enough?

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There are countries where T-shirts really matter – like Australia, where there’s almost nothing else to wear, and the USA where what you’ve got across your front says everything about you: even if the message is ‘I supersized too often’.

And then there’s Brazil, and Brazil’s hot designer Alexandre Herchcovitch. Taught to sew by his mum, who started wearing his clothes to parties when li’l Alex was only ten, he’s had his skull trademark everywhere: New York, London, Paris Munich … everybody talk about pop musik – sorry, lost the plot there. Not Munich, but everywhere else, including his home town Sao Paulo.

He’s got a store in Japan now – where he’s something of a guru, so the press says. Well I’m not sure about the hairy arsed models with the KISS make up but the tee is definitely sensei status. Not many designers can get a good drape into a T-shirt without it looking just plain flimsy. This guy does it. Not to everybody’s taste, I guess and the whole weird transsexual thing is bound to press a few buttons for the conservative, but I reckon that if you can get away with this, this T-shirt is a real head-turner

Weirdly, this man went to a strictly orthodox Jewish school. Doesn’t show, does it?

Post by Mikey, who is wondering where you go after Brazil?

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What can I tell you? With the entire resources of assorted search engines at my fingertips, I failed.

Failed.

Failure.

I hope you’ve got that message now, because I don’t intend to say it again. I don’t understand it – Egypt produces the best cotton, bar none, in the world and yet every Egyptian T-shirt I found was somewhere on the banal to blindingly ugly spectrum. I mean, look …

Isn’t that about the ugliest thing you’ve seen since your brother cut his hair with manicure scissors? Yes, I know, halloween is past, but really it’s quite scary, isn’t it?

So why is it that the same site, good old Egypt Gift Shop, has a really great graphic which is totally wasted on a tablecloth, like this:

Don’t get me wrong, I like Thanksgiving just fine and I’d have no problem eating my dinner off a hieroglyph laden cotton product, but isn’t this just the perfect image to put on a high quality tee – and yet they do nasty things like that sphinx instead.

And they don’t have a fully independent judiciary either.

Post by Kay, who’s a bit disheartened. Bring on the turkey …

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