“Free Your Mind” T Shirt

Self-made T shirt design is a way to occupy a public space without paying for it. It is creative, fun and intelligent way to spread messages into the public space involving your own self as a main manager of this particular public area. It is a minimalist way of deconstruction of the laws of "discipline and punish", which we are all forced to live with. One can use T shirts as kind of portal for spreading messages and saying his/her/its own opinion. Thus, the most typical street wear becomes a social media for those who know how to use it. It is a pop product but, through its use as a media for intervention into the public sphere and expressing own genuine attitude it becomes an activist tool, as well. The freedom of the individual to create its own T shirts makes them democratic. However, such democratic paradigm that I prescribe to T shirts presupposes democracy. It is two ways street.

Paradoxically the history of T shirt begins with the soldier’s uniform at the end of the 19^th century before or during the I WW. T shirts become part of the individual styling only after James Dean rebelled against false social norms, representing the wild, young and powerful man body dressed in a simple white T shirt. This kind of street dress went never again out of fashion. But, in the same it time kept representing the social and lower class.

What interests me here is T shirt’s potential for expressing individuality. Paradoxically, T shirts are in the same time the most universal, the most unifying piece of clothing on the globe. Pop and mega stars wear it, as well as the poorest ones, received in a form of donation, intellectuals, artists, workers. Parallel to its global use, it has also a global function. It is good for outdoor as well as for indoor. It can be comfortable but also sexy. It can be for lazy days but also for working hours. Every popular event prints its own T shirt (fresh example is the forthcoming Brazilian football championship).

However, they continue to be our private space for public representation of our own attitude, opinion, for expressing our free mind. It is a space that no one can control entirely and in this sense it is one of the most powerful tools of democracy, although, democracy presupposes its existence. Like graffiti that we wear it on our own body, which we can change it for another at any given moment, T shirts are media, which are uncontrollable. The census here cannot function entirely. Thus, a simple T shirt can be powerful political tool that always connect a concrete individual with a concrete life situation. It resists passive TV and any other type of consumerism and allows people to be interactive, provocative, always fresh and awake, always conscious about their place and role in creating cultural politics.