The T-Shirt Blog

IF you love zombies, THEN you're a necrophiliac. TRUE FALSE View Results  Loading ...

T-shirt by TShirtBordello.

I just started working on another blog, and this time it’s all about gay t-shirts. As I’ve discovered, one of the best destinations for gay tees happens to be Queer Republic, and no, it’s not all about rainbows and gay marriage like you might think (although there is some of that there if it suits you).  In fact, the site’s top notch illustration and testosterone driven slogans rival the likes of BustedTees and Snorg.

One of the favorite images on my computer is this outdated campaign t-shirt, referencing the 1988 presidential election. I grabbed it from an eBay auction years ago, and now I wish I had grabbed the shirt. It’s something I like to call a political anachronism, taking a shirt with long lost political meaning, and re-purposing it for it’s inherent irony and quaint nostalgia.

One t-shirt site that seems to share my affinity for the past is Retro Campaigns.  You won’t find any Obama or Palin there just yet, but can you really go wrong with someone like J.F.K.?  Heck, they might even let you wear it to the polls.

And the greatest present I could possibly give myself is a new and revamped T-Shirt Blog! Not everything is complete, but during the last couple of weeks I’ve put in a lot of time into tweaking the layout.  I started by upgrading the blog’s software, and I made the content area wider while also increasing the font size of most of the elements.  I believe this will make the blog easier to read, and will allow me to post bigger, higher-res images of t-shirts, which is, after all, what the blog is really about.  I also made a few minor tweaks to make sure everything is neat and aligned, removed a few elements which I deemed less than useful, and added a few things, like the email subscription widget on the upper portion of the sidebar.

More things to come:

• Completely new background images.  If you have any high res photo images or vector art that I can use, please let me know!  I’d like to use some high res t-shirt close-ups, but bandwidth may be an issue.
• Ads.
• More t-shirts!

If you are wondering what Sunshine Megatron, creator and owner of T-Shirt Hell is up to nowadays, you might be interested to learn about his next t-shirt making venture - TorsoPants.  Apparently, making really offensive t-shirts has become somewhat oldhat for Mr. Megatron, who had his name legally changed 2006.  The order of the day has become esoteric, dry-humored t-shirts that are a lot more likely to confuse than to offend.  There’s definitely some overlap between the two sites.  A few of the shirts, like Words on Shirt, Go Local Sports Team and/or College, and Home School Valedictorian have appeared on both sites at some point.[Via Westword]

I gotta say, I admire people who have enough respect for animals to leave them alone, even though personally I find it difficult to give up all those things dead animals are good for (mainly dinners, but sometimes lunches, and most certainly all those wonderful by-products of the meat industry). In any case I’m not trying to start an ethical debate here.  What I am interested in  is how one can use a t-shirt to convey a forceful message in creative way.  I feel like “No, I don’t have any spare ribs!” and “Fur Is Dead” certainly accomplish that.

Although Threadless doesn’t usually do puns, “I’m a Huge Metal Fan” is a delightfully obvious example.

Isn’t it ironic that the two highest profile online t-shirt shops couldn’t be more different from each other? Threadless is run by the still-idealistic twenty somethings who refuse corporate take over bids and find it in their hearts to sell their innocence and their shirts for $10 a pop. T-Shirt Hell, on the other hand, gets in the news by pushing the limit of free speech while making seriously offensive drags.

On your left is Green Party by T-Shirt Hell, a real party that’s twice the pun and green in color only.  The shirt on the right is Threadless’ reprint of Tom Burns’ Communist Party, a true example of Americana.