From time to time you have to put yourself on the line – and I’m sticking my neck out for Dangerous Breed. These are guys who aren’t afraid to use brilliant design to make a point. On the other hand, like a lot of T-shirt designers, they talk complete bollocks, or as they put it themselves, ‘We think our designs defy description in the classic sense. To describe or define them often defeats their purpose. Using juxtapositions or confusing metaphors, our shirts are designed to suggest thoughtful consideration, discussion, or debate. Our intention is to create these results without using obvious or literal cliches. That being said, in an attempt to give a little more background information about some of our designs, we have filled in a few blanks, hopefully without betraying our purpose.’

Uh huh? That purpose seems pretty clear to me – you wanna sell T-shirts to the gen. pub. so why get so coy about it? Admit your purpose is profit and continue to let the tees speak for themselves.

I was torn between the ‘Gaza Strip Club’ T-shirt, and this one, but in the end I went for the St Sebastian image, and it’s one of the strongest tees I’ve seen all year – gothic enough for Halloween, offensive enough to make the parson pass out, and just perfect in design terms, really stark, cool, and bound to give your Mum a hot flush (that’s a hot flash for the USA contingent, I know you have trouble keeping up sometimes…) there isn’t anywhere you could wear this and not cause commentary, except perhaps to lay flowers at Jim Morrison’s grave.

Post by Mikey who still can’t get over that Yank girl asking what state he came from

No Comments »

8Ball are right on target with a T-shirt they produced a while before the sad event. You know, the demise of the guy who made the good mayo, drove like a madman and just incidentally was a bloody fine actor.

They don’t make them like him any more.

Fortunately, they do make tees like this, although I had to go looking through a shitload of trashy tribute wear to find something that had style. It won’t cost you the earth, it look s nearly as cool as Cool Hand Luke himself and the laydeez will not be able to resist a man with the Man on his torso.

Posted by Mikey who thinks Michael Caine is nearly as cool as Paul Newman … nearly … okay, not nearly, really

2 Comments »

Justin at Burn Suburbia got in touch to tell us the blog was excellent (we already knew it, but it’s nice to hear it from readers) and to introduce us to his concept t-shirt store.

Yeah, my heart sank too. Concept tees, like Pink Floyd albums on the original vinyl, can be a bit square, but this is a concept that actually works – mainly because it’s so damn simple: one designer, one city, one shirt. Their goal is to work with designers from all over the globe to create T-shirts that celebrate some aspect of their city or its culture.

It’s a pretty eclectic mix – Tokyo (pictured) and Newcastle, Phoenix and Guadalajara, and the designs are as mixed as the cities in question, but (apart from Phoenix, which looked like it was celebrating a town in which second-rate zombie movies were made) they are all good. The T-shirt from Guadalajara, in particular, is worth your investment and it’s obviously a city that deserves to be better known, because it’s run by a canine who looks like Deputy Dawg – who knew?

Posted by Kay, who’s glad she doesn’t live in Phoenix

No Comments »

One just for our American cousins today, seeing as some of them can’t see beyond their own borders. A spiffing T-shirt from Artifex who get it right in design terms a lot of the time. The message is simple enough: VOTE.

What makes this t-shirt so clever it could be running its own company, is that the message is composed of a bunch of subversive words – like chest graffiti but in a good way.

The Artifex guys are running another contest too. Where the winner gets their design printed on an organic tee, and a cash prize and gets to nominate an environmental charity to receive 25% of the proceeds. The campaigning organisation ‘Save Mikey from Overwork’ doesn’t count, they tell me so I won’t be sending them anything. You can though, up until 20 October. Then there’s one of those voting things starting on 1 November and, just like the Presidential election, Artifex say they can overrule the voters if they want to! Details are on their blog.

Post by Mikey who is definitely an endangered species

No Comments »

Sometimes people send you to places and you really can’t suss them out – know what I mean? A case in point is Casa di Culture which I found a bit like going into a shop where (theoretically) I had every right to be but (actually) I hadn’t a clue what I was doing there. Like piano stores, for example, or those places that sell only windows …

Anyway, back to the point, which is T-shirts. A good friend in Spain pointed me in Casa di Culture’s direction and when I got there I thought it should be renamed Casa di Clutter. T-shirts were what I wanted, but this site sells: soap, tea, jewelry, baby-clothes and beauty products. And tees. And the T-shirts, if you’re of the female persuasion, are worth hunting down, even if it is a bit like searching through all your cupboards for that pair of fingerless gloves that you know used to be down the back of a drawer somewhere, but can’t find.

So this offering is perfect for the cooler months – a baby rib cotton T-shirt with boat-neck and 3/4 length sleeves – smart enough for the office, sexy enough for the evening and printed with water-based inks so it doesn’t destroy the environment. According to Casa di Clutter (sorry, Culture!) this medium fits like a small which it’s nice to know, and I reckon that it could be a big Fall hit, paired with a pair of black skinny-leg denims. (And those gloves, if you ever manage to find them.)

The site is run by a bunch of sisters (real sisters, apparently, not just sistahs) who say they ‘we are a relatively new company, so we are still adding new items and features to our site’ but I’d beg them not to add any more, just to make the navigation to what they’ve already got a bit simpler, to stop people calling them the Clutter Sisters!

Post by Kay, who’s still looking for a pair of socks she last saw at Easter …

1 Comment »

Aw … give your inner geek a warm glow – and your outer geek a freaky glow in the dark one – by investing in a bit of old skool styling allied to some modern technology. All you need is two AAA batteries and a finger to press the button on the t-shirt and you have an amazing animated frontage!

The truly scary thing about this shirt (apart from being able to tell impressionable half-wit non-geeks that it’s a radioactive isotope or two that makes it glow so nicely, which is not true, it’s actually electroluminescent technology) is that you can end up with a helluva crick in your neck from watching while wearing.

As ever, it’s a freaky deaky Thinkgeek production and if you have an inner geek, the guys at Thinkgeek are going to be on your wavelength until you grow up/get married/die whichever of the three happens first (and let’s be honest, if you’re a true geek, it’s going to be 3, isn’t it?) and will be supplying you with weird, wonderful and vaguely scientific tees forever. And if anybody ever invites you to a party, you can wear this T-shirt and glow in the dark, but let’s not hold our breath because geeks and parties? … it’s not a common occurrence.

Posted by Kay, who has a crush on the supercollider

No Comments »

You can’t leave the place for a minute without the whole thing going to cock. Design is what matters, not all this poncey rubbish about saving the planet or being on a mission! So less words and more tees are in order.
Aaitski know their business and don’t get silly about it. Witness – the tramquilizah t-shirt:

Good T-shirts from a country that produces beer and blondes – can’t be any argument with that! Go visit their site for stonking tees, but also have a chortle at the range of peculiar photographs sent in by people claiming to be real. This guy would probably be illegal over here, btw. Happy … but illegal.

Post by Mikey, who can’t understand where his tent went

No Comments »

Five Humans describes itself as a company on a mission – but it’s not one of those shoot first, ask questions afterwards type missions that involves a man with a lot of muscles and a car chase. Nope, it’s a mission to cure ignorance of disease through hip, fashionable clothing.

Ah … how does that work then?

Apparently their T-shirts support world-wide diseases such as Autism, Cancer, Asthma, Diabetes, and Heart Disease.

Right. And …?

They’ve released disease related tees.

That sounds so weird … but actually it’s not. I mean, is there anything you can buy these days that doesn’t support some good cause? There are days, like today, when I really long to be able to order a non-fair-trade cappuccino, pour five peasant-exploiting, carcinogen-inducing sugars into it and drink it in the back of a global-polluting taxi, while insulting cyclists out the window. But hey, those days are long gone! Now my coffee helps pay for dental care in Ecuador, my sugar supports the elderly in Pakistan and I catch the bus to work.

Enough of me – back to the tee which is an elegant item, with something of a goth feel to it (and the who are Goths lurking and not posting can stop now, I know you’re there, Isobel!) and really nice colorways which isn’t always the case with this kind of charity wear which often looks like somebody only had kiddie-style poster paints to work with. So I support the Do The Math T-shirt: it saves the world, reduces ignorance and looks good.

And there’s 15% off entire collection from Sept 5th to the 14th if that gets your charitable impulses moving …

Post by Kay who wants to own a white cat and a swivel chair and take over the world …

No Comments »

Tuesday Teez is one of those ‘what it says on the tin’ type sites. What it says is: Join us every Tuesday as we spotlight some of the most creative t-shirt designs on the web today. Take your time and look around…you never know what you’ll find, so be sure to come back each week as we add new stuff to the pile. Enjoy!

And that’s just what you get. Having a browse, I came across this rather cheeky little offering from ViceVoices.

And that’s exactly what I needed for a preggers friend who actually has a sense of humour as well (what is it with women who gestate and get their fun genes turned off for the duration? Weird!) so I thought she’d appreciate this. Absolutely huge kudos to ViceVoices for offering a maternity tee with a good image instead of the completely crap clothing you find in maternity stores (and similar kyudes to Tuesday Teez for featuring it). And there’s some nice news – you get $5 off when you spend $40 or more with the coupon code: Cafepoa540. I know what Mikey would be saying at this point about some people not living in a $ economy but I’m going to ignore him, as he’s still sulking from last week.

Posted by Kay who can’t help feeling that it would be really funny if a room full of pregnant women was hit by a very large bowling ball

2 Comments »

As Mikey is sulking about American imperialism I thought I’d try to celebrate his great cultural heritage to cheer him up. After all the country that gave us girrrl power and Daniel Craig was bound to offer up something we could all get behind, right?

I browsed around for something British, something stylish and something worth looking at. My intuition was not wrong – but make sure your Mom and kid sibs can’t see the screen before you settle in to enjoy, and then tell me this isn’t the funniest, sexiest, coolest tee-shirt-selling advert you ever saw? If only every T-shirt retailer had this much chutzpah …

They even have some pretty good t-shirts, do Atlantic Colours

Post by Kay who isn’t telling what’s in her handbag …

No Comments »