The Relentless Pursuit of Meaning

Why the words on your T-shirt still matter

A few years ago, here in Finland where I live, I spotted a young woman wearing a Grinnell College sweatshirt at the local mall. It was the same sweatshirt I owned, one I’d purchased from the college bookstore years earlier, worn occasionally, mostly to college picnics. Sometimes, when I wore it in public, strangers would approach me and ask, “Did you go to Grinnell?” “Yes, I would say. Class of 1986.” It was a badge of pride. A way to recognize others with similar backgrounds and make connections.

In the summer of 1974, when John Lennon donned the now iconic white T-shirt with cut-off sleeves bearing the words New York City for a Bob Gruen photo shoot, Gruen may have chosen the shirt for him, but what was printed on it meant something. At the time, Lennon was under surveillance by the FBI and fighting to stay in the United States. He loved New York. Just six years later he would be assassinated there.

Wearing t-shirts emblazoned with place names has been common for decades. Remember those novelty shirts people used to buy on holiday and bring home as consolation prizes to friends and family? “My friend went to Guantanamo Bay and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.”

People no longer feel the need to go somewhere - the country, the city, the college -- or to see the band whose name is on their clothes. What’s written on a shirt means nothing.

In 1978’s “Animal House,” in anticipatory irony, John Belushi as Bluto Blutarsky wore a sweatshirt with a single word, foreshadowing the degradation of meaning and its relationship to the wearer: “College.”

A modern version might be “Famous band,” or “Popular location.”

Never mind the Bollocks (er, Sex Pistols) or Ramones, Nirvana, Pink Floyd, Rolling Stones, or Misfits shirts worn by people who aren’t really fans, or shirts emblazoned with Harvard, Yale, MIT, or the University of Southern California worn by people with zero affiliation with those schools. (My kids sometimes wear Monmouth College shirts, but my dad taught there for almost five decades and bought the shirts for them, so I think they’ve earned the right.)

Last summer, while shopping at an outlet in Finland, I came across a New York University T-shirt on a sale rack for eight euros. I was completing my master’s degree at NYU at the time and was impressed that New York University was apparently trendy enough that the Danish clothing company Jack & Jones thought it would sell shirts. A few years before I’d been wearing my NYU sweatshirt on holiday in Arizona and a stranger had asked me which campus as he was an alum.

There seems no end to what Jim Poe called “the commodification of cool.”

Poe’s observation about how you could once trust that someone wearing a Ramones shirt was someone you might want to hang out with or at least knew something about their music is worth quoting at length:

“Somewhere along the way, though, something slipped, and the signs and signifiers of street apparel become abstractified. . . And these days you can wear just about any logo – any band’s shirt, any sports team’s insignia – and get away with not knowing what you’re representing. This has been going on for so many years it no longer feels ridiculous; it’s just a thing, like any other thing.”

I bought the New York University shirt at the outlet and wore it to Paris the following month where I completed my degree in creative writing at NYU’s Paris campus. Like Grinnell, NYU is a real school, that issues real degrees. So far, I don’t see Grinnell College shirts being mass marketed by Jack & Jones. But who knows which real or imaginary school will be next? (As a Doctor Who fan, I own one T-Shirt myself advertising the fictitious “Gallifrey University,” and of course, my kids wear Hogwarts gear.)

It’s unpredictable what people deem worth printing on a shirt. At the 2001 Reading Festival in England, multiple people wore shirts saying “Illinois.” The state of my own birth was a fashion statement that summer and maybe still is. Of all the states in America, Illinois is not the first one thinks of as cool enough to be worn by festivalgoers in the UK. But what did I know?

A few years ago, I picked up a Chicago tank top from a sporting goods chain in Finland. Its white-on-blue block capital letters reminded me of Lennon’s New York City shirt. Though I’ve never lived in Chicago, after I moved away from the US, our many visits to it made it one of my favorite American cities. I wore that shirt proudly that summer. My John Lennon moment perhaps, for America’s “Second City.”

Every T-shirt I own has a story. I sleep in a shirt that says, “Space Camp,” which although it sounds made up, I assure you is a real place. I bought the shirt when visiting the US Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama in 2009.

I caught up with the woman wearing the Grinnell shirt at the mall in Finland and asked her, “Did you go to Grinnell?”

“No,” she said.

Dumbfounded, I asked, “Then why are you wearing that shirt?”

“It's my friend’s shirt,” she said. “And she didn’t go there either.”

So much for connection.

I felt deceived.

Maybe it’s time to give the plain white T another chance.  

Who needs words?