So you’ve been there and done that. Toting away bagfuls of glossy merchandise from shopping malls no longer thrills. You’ve seen it all at the many factory outlets. You’re so proficient at Internet shopping that you’ve become some kind of master of foreign exchange rates, foreign goods taxes, Internet security and Australian customs law. You’re looking for something new.
How about this? Try buying Swedish t-shirts by subscription.
The idea sounds batty, sure. It goes like this: you part with 26 Euros (about $45) every six weeks and T-post, a t-shirt subscription service, will send a fresh t-shirt made in downtown Los Angeles to your mailbox in suburban Canberra.
The design on the shirts is based on a current news item and the article in question is printed inside. Rather than a chief executive officer or company director, the t-shirt business has an “editor-in-chief”.
Fact is, you get your t-shirt sight unseen and because the business compares itself to a magazine or other periodical, returns of a shirt because you don’t like it are no more possible than sending back your copy of National Geographic because you have no interest in articles about the Serengeti.
But the fact you’ll sometimes hate the shirt they send and other times you’ll love it is part of the fun. The element of surprise in goods can be exciting (think Kinder Surprise), but subscription clothing would require the “subscriber” to be greatly in love with the concept to make up for inevitable disappointment from time to time. Unless you’re easily pleased.
Could the subscription model of sales work for other kinds of goods? I doubt even the most Imelda-like shoe lovers would wish to buy shoes by subscription – shoe lovers can usually be identified by their exacting taste. But maybe kitchen gadgetry (for once one has the avocado slicer and melon baller, one is apt to want the fancy nut cracker and the bread maker) or certain kinds of books might suit this method.
T-post has more than 2500 subscribers wearing its shirts. Some of the designs look like anatomy illustrations, others are a little humourous (like a big pair of white teeth grinning from the wearer’s chest), others are abstract, or vaguely philosophical (“What you see is what you see”). One that made me smile was the slogan “The S, M, L, XL is the message” with the M circled. Geddit? It’s a cute reference to an expression the communications theorist Marshall McLuhan coined, “the medium is the message”. Clever, no?
Less appealing shirts have slogans like “three fingered son of a bitch without a soul”, which would make the wearer appear to have violent, negative feelings for the Simpsons.
Another interesting thing about T-post is its choice of models. The people wearing the shirts aren’t beautiful on the whole (though they are almost exclusively thin and young, save for a pair of older people bravely baring their cellulite). It’s unclear whether the male/female pairings are romantic couples and if so whether the female/female pairing is a lesbian couple. All are posed holding hands and dressed in white underwear, making the effect overall on the gallery page a bit cult-like. The cult of T-post.
One of the nice things about the business is it is trying to get people to embrace the news, albeit in an unconventional way.
Off on a tangent, I’ve wondered whether newspaper print clothes are a good look.
I saw a couple of newspaper print garments in a day – a pair of skinny trousers bought in Amsterdam on a fashion design student and a t-shirt covered with headlines and stories on one of this newspaper’s sub-editors.
But are these garments too much, especially on a reporter? Would it be witty or kind of insane the way it would be if your veterinarian carried a dog-shaped handbag?
T-post is at www.t-post.se.