Getting Shirty

The 1980s were sometimes known as “The Designer Decade” when the “D” word was often used as a rather snide label for anything that was trendy, superficial, made-over, expensive, exclusive (I was a designer in the late 1980s and got bloody annoyed that my job title was used as an insult.) People drank designer beer and designer water, men sported designer stubble on their faces and we even had designer banks and designer socialism. So it’s no wonder the decade also brought us designer political protest.

One of the iconic fashion items of the era was the baggy white t-shirt with a big slogan on it, though popularized and ripped-off by Wham! and Frankie Goes To Hollywood the original slogan shirts were created with a serious political purpose by British fashion designer Katherine Hamnett in 1983 and had messages like WORLDWIDE NUCLEAR BAN NOW, STOP KILLING WHALES, and EDUCATION NOT MISSILES. A portion of the profits from them went to charity and their simple bold type was designed to be easily copied by others so that the messages on them would become more widespread. While all the FRANKIE SAY RELAX t-shirts may have diluted her original intent somewhat it’s easy to snigger at the idealistic notion of a mere t-shirt having any political effect whatsoever, and that fact that some were made out of expensive silk makes them look like just another silly example of Radical Chic. I went on quite a few demos back then and don’t remember too many people wearing them, the fashion there being mostly Oxfam and Dr. Marten.

Naive fashionista she might have been but I’ll give Hamnett this, she did have the balls to wear this t-shirt when she met Maggie Thatcher at a Downing Street reception in 1984.

(Pershing is the American nuclear missile system that was being deployed in Germany at the time)

I started writing about all this because I actually had a hand in producing Hamnett’s original t-shirts. Between leaving school and going to art college I worked for a couple of years at a silkscreen printers in Fulham who mostly did the sort of rock and pop t-shirts you saw on sale down the King’s Road and in Kensington Market. Then one day in walks this woman Katherine Hamnett with some typeset artwork of slogans in heavy black letters she wanted us to print on some baggy t-shirts she had designed herself, some were cotton and some silk (which were a real bugger to print and dry). I can’t remember how many different slogans there were but she came back several times with new ones. My job was on the pre-press side, photographing the artwork onto film (the original type for those shirts was tiny, only about 2″ high) and making the screens for printing, so I helped produce the very t-shirt she is wearing above. It’s not much I know but it’s the closest I ever got to Maggie Thatcher, pity Hamnett didn’t have a design that said FUCK OFF AND DIE, YOU BITCH.

Download: Two Tribes (Annihilation Mix) – Frankie Goes To Hollywood (mp3)