Voxfrock is thrilled to the gills to present this thoughtful crack at fashion’s most universal garment by new intern, Alexia Petsinis. What does it all mean? Take it away, Miss Petsinis…
Oh, you humble bumble tee, how is it that thee, can hang off thy body as a blank canvas, expressionless, commodified, yet the truest expression of me?
Excruciating rhyme. Apologies. It had to be done.
Here at Voxfrock, we like to pull things apart. We love a bit of a shuffle around. To celebrate International T-Shirt Day 2013, we’ve decided to dissect the aesthetic of the timid T-shirt. Sure, we all own at least three. Or thirty. Some are ripped, sagging, splattered with the memory of a hideous DIY job. Others are the prisoners of crusty 90’s boy band emblems. Reminders of days you’d rather forget, I’m sure.
Regardless of how the T-shirt is represented in your wardrobe, on this day, we ask you to reassess your perception of this ‘fashion commodity’ (leaving Marx out of this, of course). Just breathe, and take a moment to appreciate the significance of this garment as an ‘art object’; something that can be reorganised in a Dada-esque manner to speak volumes about our society and its core aesthetic and cultural values.
If you know a thing or two about Dadaism, you’ll understand that it was a gloriously incongruous artistic discourse essentially governed by the notion: ‘Take something familiar. Make it strange. See what happens.’ Dada artists like Marcel Duchamp and Hans Arp worked towards the ideal of removing commonplace objects from their natural surroundings, putting them in a gallery space to entirely change their meaning and functionality. All of a sudden, a urinal is not a urinal anymore. Or is it?
While the defining characteristic of the T-Shirt is (surprise surprise) the ‘T’ shape made with the sleeves and body, we can plump the ego of this object by divorcing it from its role as ‘mere casual torso concealer.’
Miss Petsinis models her own experimental T-shirt design. Photograph: Joshua Montebello
With a snip here, and a dab of paint there (sorry Mum, mess is self expression after all), or a knot where we all know it shouldn’t be, the ‘T-shirt’ as we know it, is no longer a T-shirt at all. It is the canvas upon which we express the wildest flourishes of our creative spirit. It is the vehicle through which we project out social ideals. In this sense, the humble tee goes down as one of the symbolic heroes of avant-garde modernism along with Uncle Urinal and Brother Bike Wheel. Good things come in tees, I mean threes, right?
“I think these days T-Shirts have become their own form of wearable art, acting as much more than a fashion garment,” offers Sydney based graphic artist and T-Shirt illustrator Alex Lehours. Lehours has recently had a collection of his fabulously evocative prints picked up by T-Shirt chain store T-Bar. He believes that something as simple as the addition of a graphic image is a form of T-shirt manipulation with the capacity to highlight “dark truths of certain subjects and issues.” I see your ears prick up. Who doesn’t love a subtle Chest Protest these days!
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T-Shirt designs by Alex Lehours, from $40 to $50 at T-Bar stores and online: www.t-bar.com.au/designers/ALEX_LEHOURS and www.alexlehours.com
At this point, I’d like to leave you with my own interpretation of the tee, good friends. It has something to do with ‘The Body as a Gallery’; exploring the idea that we can project multiple angles of our soul in the one garment. After all, if the walls of an art gallery are the spaces where individual aesthetic expressions mingle and marinade, then why can’t the body be a site to display the patchwork of our creative intellect? Yes, the acts of snipping and tying many small, illustrated cards to the ghost of an old white tee ensures that it is no longer, well, a T-Shirt anymore. What exactly it is now, I’ll leave up to you to decide.
Happy International T-Shirt Day all!
Alexia Petsinis, intern@voxfrock.com.au
Main photograph of Miss Petsinis by Joshua Montebello
“The Body is a Gallery. Countless cards featuring my digitally manipulated illustrations of famous Modernist artists in wacky/frivolous garb are woven in to strands of what was once a T-Shirt. This manipulation proves that we can divorce even the simplest of garments from their perceived functionality; transforming them into potent artistic expressions of our intrinsic self.” Alexia Petsinis.
