LOVE SEE NO COLOR, the T-shirts read, stacked in neat piles on a card table. They are there every day on the south side of Portland’s Pioneer Square, available for 10 dollars each.
It’s summer break, 1993, and I spend most Saturdays near the square with my friends, trying to avoid getting ticketed for underage smoking, loitering, and jaywalking. We use paper clips to make free pay phone calls to each other’s pagers, passing notes in numeric code. We pierce our own ears in the bathrooms of the Nordstrom across the street. We sneak samples from the perfume counter to scent our Zippos with CK One. We wade in the fountain in front of the Civic Auditorium.
My parents give me some money for back-to-school clothes so I buy a LOVE SEE NO COLOR T-shirt. It’s a Hanes men’s size medium and hangs off my shoulders in a just-right way. It must have been screen printed hastily, because the black is a little streaky in places. Made for a man, there is nothing soft or yielding about the shirt. The collar is thick, double-strength. So are the seams on the sleeves. After washing, the fabric loosens a bit but it stays stiff. I adore its coarseness.
The shirt looks cutest with super-short cutoffs and docs, but it also works with jeans. It dresses up, knotted at the bottom over a denim mini; it dresses down, tucked into too-big men’s slacks from the Goodwill.
I get tons of compliments. No one ever mentions race.
But things have changed. The population has grown by 50 percent since 2000 and the average cost of a house has more than doubled. There are homeless encampments on the margins of every public space. Most of the city seems to be either shantytowns or luxury condos. An entire downtown neighborhood has been constructed where there was once a huge rail yard.
I am living in that neighborhood. If, while I am sleeping, my bed is magically transported back to 1993, I will wake up hanging in space, 50 feet above a freight train.
I look for my old friends, scouring faces for something familiar.
At Powell’s Books, I see a woman about my age wearing a white T-shirt with the title of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s book We Should All Be Feminists screen-printed on it in all caps. The letters are a little bit faded. She’s flipping through Roxane Gay’s Hunger, thoughtfully biting the nail of her index finger. Even though I know I’ve never met her, I have a rush of identification and unconsciously move closer to her, feeling comfortable in the proximity of a stranger who feels familiar.
When I get home, I Google the T-shirt and learn that it retails for $710 at Dior. That is when I learn that I can no longer tell the difference between friends and enemies.
It’s summer break, 1993, and I spend most Saturdays near the square with my friends, trying to avoid getting ticketed for underage smoking, loitering, and jaywalking. We use paper clips to make free pay phone calls to each other’s pagers, passing notes in numeric code. We pierce our own ears in the bathrooms of the Nordstrom across the street. We sneak samples from the perfume counter to scent our Zippos with CK One. We wade in the fountain in front of the Civic Auditorium.
My parents give me some money for back-to-school clothes so I buy a LOVE SEE NO COLOR T-shirt. It’s a Hanes men’s size medium and hangs off my shoulders in a just-right way. It must have been screen printed hastily, because the black is a little streaky in places. Made for a man, there is nothing soft or yielding about the shirt. The collar is thick, double-strength. So are the seams on the sleeves. After washing, the fabric loosens a bit but it stays stiff. I adore its coarseness.The shirt looks cutest with super-short cutoffs and docs, but it also works with jeans. It dresses up, knotted at the bottom over a denim mini; it dresses down, tucked into too-big men’s slacks from the Goodwill.
I get tons of compliments. No one ever mentions race.
¤
It’s 2018 and the political “slogan tee” is back in style, along with a bunch of other things that were bad ideas in the 1990s, including alternative rock, pre-ripped jeans, and heroin. I’m back in Portland for the summer, where the ’90s vibe is particularly intense. The T-shirts say things like LOVE WINS and PEOPLE ARE PEOPLE. Everywhere I go I hear Bush and Smashing Pumpkins on the radio. There’s a lot of purple hair dye and chokers. And it isn’t just fashion and music that seem to have reeled back two decades. Last year, two men were murdered by a white supremacist on a commuter train, echoing the 1988 murder of Mulugeta Seraw by neo-Nazi skinheads. If I squint, I feel like I’m 14 again.But things have changed. The population has grown by 50 percent since 2000 and the average cost of a house has more than doubled. There are homeless encampments on the margins of every public space. Most of the city seems to be either shantytowns or luxury condos. An entire downtown neighborhood has been constructed where there was once a huge rail yard.
I am living in that neighborhood. If, while I am sleeping, my bed is magically transported back to 1993, I will wake up hanging in space, 50 feet above a freight train.
I look for my old friends, scouring faces for something familiar.
At Powell’s Books, I see a woman about my age wearing a white T-shirt with the title of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s book We Should All Be Feminists screen-printed on it in all caps. The letters are a little bit faded. She’s flipping through Roxane Gay’s Hunger, thoughtfully biting the nail of her index finger. Even though I know I’ve never met her, I have a rush of identification and unconsciously move closer to her, feeling comfortable in the proximity of a stranger who feels familiar.
When I get home, I Google the T-shirt and learn that it retails for $710 at Dior. That is when I learn that I can no longer tell the difference between friends and enemies.
¤
In his 1932 study, The Concept of the Political, Carl Schmitt offers the following definition of politics: the “political is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping.”
Schmitt believed that the political sphere was inherently antagonistic, and that any attempts to make it otherwise amounted to a denial of politics as such. To be political, he argues, is to be fundamentally concerned with the distinction between one’s friends and one’s enemies.
According to all the reports, we are in a new era of political fashion, with a particular emphasis on the slogan tee. From high-fashion designers such as Prabal Gurung, Christian Siriano, and, of course, Dior, to small boutiques such as Portland’s own Wildfang, to online print-your-own novelty shops, slogan T-shirts can be found virtually everywhere. Even The New York Times has gotten into the slogan tee business, prompting controversy with its shirt responding to Donald Trump’s assault on journalism. Designed by Sacai and currently available for $300 at Saks, the shirt reads: “Truth. It’s more important now than ever.”
Kari Molvar, assessing the phenomenon for Allure, sounds accidentally Schmittian when she argues that the slogan tee offers “a form of bonding among those who share the same beliefs.” Other fashion insiders agree. The season’s obsession with slogan tees, according to Sarah Young, is a function of the desire for “a visual marker for what you believe in.” The slogan tee, according to this notion, is like a military uniform or tribal marker. It should alert a person to who her friends are. It should be a vehicle for the intensification of politics.
And in a certain sense this is the case. The slogan tee is one of many cultural markers of polarization in the United States today. The left has pink hats and NASTY WOMAN T-shirts; the right has red hats and DON’T TREAD ON ME T-shirts. It doesn’t seem too far-fetched to imagine that pink and red could take the place of blue and gray in a 21st-century civil war.
But on the other hand, the slogan-tee-as-fashion-item has a longer history, one that precedes our current moment. The trend has roots in the commercialization of the counterculture in the 1960s and punk in the 1970s. Slogan tees with bold black letters first became a fashion trend in the 1980s and ’90s. They took a hiatus during the ironic 2000s and minimalist early 2010s and are now back. This history does not coincide with a steady rise in political polarization. The ease with which the slogan tee was marketed after the end of the 1960s is a sign not of a populace generally more concerned with politics, but of something quite different: the increasing speed with which oppositional cultural markers are subsumed into commerce and incorporated into the mainstream.
The slogan tee, as a symptom of this trajectory, is not a vehicle for politics, for marking the difference between friends and enemies. It is rather evidence of the ease with which dissent can be marketed. Rather than a sign of increased polarization, of increased political energy, the popularity of the slogan tee is evidence of the dissolution of the political.
by Rachel Greenwald Smith, LARB | Read more:
Image: Dior
Schmitt believed that the political sphere was inherently antagonistic, and that any attempts to make it otherwise amounted to a denial of politics as such. To be political, he argues, is to be fundamentally concerned with the distinction between one’s friends and one’s enemies.
According to all the reports, we are in a new era of political fashion, with a particular emphasis on the slogan tee. From high-fashion designers such as Prabal Gurung, Christian Siriano, and, of course, Dior, to small boutiques such as Portland’s own Wildfang, to online print-your-own novelty shops, slogan T-shirts can be found virtually everywhere. Even The New York Times has gotten into the slogan tee business, prompting controversy with its shirt responding to Donald Trump’s assault on journalism. Designed by Sacai and currently available for $300 at Saks, the shirt reads: “Truth. It’s more important now than ever.”
Kari Molvar, assessing the phenomenon for Allure, sounds accidentally Schmittian when she argues that the slogan tee offers “a form of bonding among those who share the same beliefs.” Other fashion insiders agree. The season’s obsession with slogan tees, according to Sarah Young, is a function of the desire for “a visual marker for what you believe in.” The slogan tee, according to this notion, is like a military uniform or tribal marker. It should alert a person to who her friends are. It should be a vehicle for the intensification of politics.
And in a certain sense this is the case. The slogan tee is one of many cultural markers of polarization in the United States today. The left has pink hats and NASTY WOMAN T-shirts; the right has red hats and DON’T TREAD ON ME T-shirts. It doesn’t seem too far-fetched to imagine that pink and red could take the place of blue and gray in a 21st-century civil war.
But on the other hand, the slogan-tee-as-fashion-item has a longer history, one that precedes our current moment. The trend has roots in the commercialization of the counterculture in the 1960s and punk in the 1970s. Slogan tees with bold black letters first became a fashion trend in the 1980s and ’90s. They took a hiatus during the ironic 2000s and minimalist early 2010s and are now back. This history does not coincide with a steady rise in political polarization. The ease with which the slogan tee was marketed after the end of the 1960s is a sign not of a populace generally more concerned with politics, but of something quite different: the increasing speed with which oppositional cultural markers are subsumed into commerce and incorporated into the mainstream.
The slogan tee, as a symptom of this trajectory, is not a vehicle for politics, for marking the difference between friends and enemies. It is rather evidence of the ease with which dissent can be marketed. Rather than a sign of increased polarization, of increased political energy, the popularity of the slogan tee is evidence of the dissolution of the political.
by Rachel Greenwald Smith, LARB | Read more:
Image: Dior
