Zoo York Subway 1999

I bought this t-shirt on a snowboarding trip to the States in 1999. It’s defo one of my all-time favourites which I’ve only recently had to stop wearing. I thought that there were some marks appearing around the graphic, but then I realised that it was the fabric of the tee wearing away from years of solid use! I stopped wearing it for fear that at some point the print would just fall out of the front of the shirt!

The image is a New York subway car composed from the words “Zoo York”, which I’ve always liked. It’s kept its shape for ten years now and still fits as well as it did when I forst got it.

Quality.

6. Pa:nuu Groucho

Every year Helen and I head out to Mallorca at least once to stay in my Uncle’s villa and live the high life in the sun. We’ve come to love the island’s capital city Palma de Mallorca, it’s got a really good vibe and some great shops (including Helen’s new favourite).

This tee came from a Palma mission in September 2008. I just like the fact that it kinda looks like me, which is daft I know, but there you go. I’d never heard of the brand Pa:nuu before I got the shirt, and I haven’t seen them anywhere else since. I just found out it’s a Danish brand started in 2006. Now I know…

5. American Apparel Fuschia

There are a few of these American Apparel shirts in my drawer. Despite the weird hipster-ness and near-Emporer’s-New-Clothes nothingness of most of their men’s stuff, I do dig the shirts. They’re well made and consistent, they always fit well, and I haven’t had a single one go mis-shapen on me yet!

I picked this one up on an outing to London which turned from a day trip to an overnighter. After spending an uncomfortable night with three of us jammed into a colleague’s hotel room I needed some fresh clothes to wear, so after a quick trip to AA, I had a t-shirt, pair of underpants and sport socks all in this dashing fuschia colour. Dipped and ready to face the day!

This is one of the few shirts I own that is not a medium; it’s a small as I was getting into skinny jeans when I bought it.

The best thing about this tee is that it now has a very special memory associated with it. Since starting this blog my wife gave birth to a beautiful little girl, Jet Reiko, at home. This was the t-shirt I was wearing throughout Helen’s labour and the birth of my first child. It’s defo put the t-shirt up the favourite scale a few notches!

4. Love thy Fly 53

Love thy Fly53

This one was a freebie from a fashion fair in Bristol at Paintworks. This was back in 2007 before we got married there in September. Helen found her wedding dress at this fair, so it was a pretty successful mission!

I got this shirt in two sizes, a small and a medium, as Helen got one too. I quite like the design on this shirt, it’s got a good edge of gnar, even if it’s not the best execution in the world. It’s not particularly a brand I would go for normally, but the main reason this one and its partner stay near the bottom of the drawer is because they’ve both suffered from the dreaded vertical shrinkage! They’re significantly shorter than they started out and are cursed with a touch of bell-tent syndrome to boot.

Ah well, plenty more tees in the sea…

3. Graniph pirate tape

Graniph Pirate Cassette

This is one of those shirts that causes me pleasure and pain in equal measures.

It was bought from a shop called Graniph in Harajuku, Tokyo, when I was on my honeymoon. It reminds me of that amazing time, and I’m a big fan of the graphic as I’ve always found the “home taping is killing music ” thing a joke (You may kill off the music industry, but music will never die). And it’s a fresh illustration.

The pain is classic t-shirt pain; this thing is mis-shapen like a motherf****r! It seems like you just can’t tell, sometimes a cheap-looking tee will hold firm and last a lifetime, whilst what looks like high-quality merch will end up looking like a bell tent after the first wash. This is one of those unfortunate items. F***!

2. 101 Dirty Angel

101 Dirty Angel

This is my gnarly t-shirt. It must be, because at the DLH fun day last year my mate Wes pointed out to me that I’d worn this shirt to the previous two DLH fun days.

I can’t remember exactly when I got this t-shirt, but I think it was from Roller Mania skate shop in Bristol. I would hazard a guess that I was still a student at the time, so maybe 1998-99? It feels like it’s always been with me, and I want it to be with me for ever. There’s something about this kind of rockin’ black tee that means that the more knackered and faded it gets, the more legit it looks. At least that’s what I keep telling myself.

I once wore it to a salsa lesson without realising, and had to turn it inside out as it was drawing funny looks from some of the older ladies I had to dance with…

1. Cazal (bootleg)

Cazal (bootleg)

I’m starting things off with a current favourite.

This is one of the very few items of clothing I’ve bought from ebay. I was idly browsing Cazal frames to see if there were any bargains (there weren’t) when I came across this beauty. I wear Cazal glasses every day, and I love the logo, I love what the Cazal brand represents – it’s so inseperable from hip-hop with the Run DMC connection, and the stories of what kids in New York would do to get hold of a pair in the early ’80s.

This t-shirt was advertised as New Old Stock, but when it arrived, the design was on an American Apparel shirt, which I’m pretty sure weren’t around when Cazal was big back in the day! Anyway – I don’t care, AA shirts fit me good and last well, so I’m just stoked to have it. The logo is flocked, which was an unexpected bonus, and these colours really do it for me right now; I can’t get enough pink and purple, if it just had a splash of turquoise on it I’d probably explode!

Every t-shirt in my drawer

I’ve always thought it would have been cool to have taken a photo of every new item of clothing I bought when it was fresh and new. Even better would be to have photographically documented all the outfits that I found that really made me feel the business. I’ve never done it though. To start to do it now seems like a painful exercise as it might just serve as a reminder of all those outfits that have slipped out of favour, each of it’s constituent pieces now faded and stuck at the back of a drawer, or worse – shoved in a bin bag and dropped off at the charity shop.

As a nod towards this desire to document my clothes, I thought I’d have a go at photographing every t-shirt that was in my t-shirt drawer on one particular day. I photographed all of the shirts that weren’t in the wash, or stuffed in the bottom of the wardrobe, or in rarely-worn limbo in the box in the top cupboard.

I’m not claiming to have a particularly remarkable collection of t-shirts. In fact to call this a collection is to give too much significance to a fairly random selection of upper-body-covering-devices. They’re just what I wear. I love them, I’m indifferent to them. They are the bedrock of my wardrobe.

They’re every t-shirt in my drawer.

A taste of what's to come