Fashion 87 : Call It a Summer of ’87 Reprise: ‘Wacky T-Shirts II, III, IV . . .’
T-shirts are like prizefighters. They make more comebacks than anybody can count. Even the people who design them for a living can hardly believe it.
“Just when you think they’re dying, they’re back again even stronger,” said Rick Rietveld, who noticed this recently when the T-shirts he designs with Jeff Yokoyamo for Maui & Sons helped set off a craze that is taking hold for summer.
Not that Maui has the market cornered. A dozen or more companies are doing their own version of the summer of ‘87’s hippest-looking shirt. And this time around, as always, the world’s most basic garment manages to look like none other that went before it.
Graphics set the latest style apart. Graphics as bright as Day-Glo paint, as big and bold as poster art. Most of the action is set on the back of the shirts, as if the designers see that broad, flat space as a body’s built-in movie screen.
Scenes from science-fiction monster wars are particularly popular pictures. Talking sharks and bug-eyed dinosaurs swish around in scenes that look like stills from animated movies.
But the T-shirts with scenes you would swear could squeal “California” are all about the surf. Some have oversize snapshots that show surfboards stacked into a “woody”--that classic, wood-sided station wagon the Beach Boys used to sing about. There are shirts with split-screen images of as many as four surf competitions going on at once. And shirts with wacky messages, such as “Surf Russia.”
Like so many home-grown fashion trends before it, this one has gone from California across the country. At Surf Fetish, president Carl Jones says his designs sell as well in New York’s Bloomingdale’s as Saks, Beverly Hills.
“The look has its roots in West Coast surfing, but it’s become national, contemporary sportswear,” he says. “People wear the clothes to work or out to dinner.”
That is as much as to say adults are onto the look. But the fact is the kids got there first. They can pick out a shirt from Surf Fetish, Maui & Sons, Gotcha, Op, Jimmy ‘Z and at least half a dozen others faster than the sound of a speeding surfboard. That’s because the companies have been in business for a while now. And they make more than shirts. Most of them have shorts, surfer’s jams, swim trunks and miniskirts too.
Jimmy ‘Z president Sepp Donahower says the T-shirts in particular are in great demand right now, “because of the run on California-life-style clothing that’s going on all across the country.”
It’s not even officially summer, but the collector’s-item syndrome that often accompanies graphic T-shirts has already started.
At Jimmy ‘Z, art director Jim Catalano says they’re gearing up to reprint some of their own classics. Back by popular demand will be, among other zanies, the “outlaw” shirt. It shows a skull and skateboard crossbones.
