With the power and distinctiveness of their voices, T-shirts have the potential to be more than markers of identity, but makers of it. Print up a hundred "Fight the Power" T-shirts and you're on your way to organizing a protest. With the falling costs of printing, it's never been easier to garb your own grassroots movement. Granted, mass production may add an element of laziness to the protest--why actually speak for yourself when you have a T-shirt that says it for you? But it's also clear that T-shirts make the higher-ups nervous: when the South African government cracked down on free speech during apartheid, T-shirts were one of the censors' targets.
Nowadays reactionaries as well as revolutionaries are using their chests as billboards. In the mid-nineties, the Ku Klux Klan tried to rehabilitate its image by dispensing with the white hood and robe. Instead, members wore T-shirts that depicted a hooded Klansman with the words, "The Original Boys N the Hood." The KKK was discarding its ceremonial garb--which linked them to an anachronistic cult--in favor of something younger and hipper. What the T-shirts wanted to say was, "Join us because we're everyday guys who just don't like non-white people."
A T-shirt can say things like that. In fact, it can say just about anything you want it to--as July's face-off in Philadelphia showed. In that case, as in many others in which the T-shirt plays politics, it was a weapon of last resort, prompted by disillusionment with traditional political pathways. For the police officers whose superiors bowed to public pressure and refused to back them, the "Welcome, America" T-shirts expressed a subtle defiance of those higher-ups and the civilians who disapproved of their muscular response to crime. For members of the black community fed up with being ignored by government officials, the T-shirts enabled them to make their own bodies speak, and speak loudly.
The cultural critic Malcolm Barnard once talked about "fashion as communication." Here was a case in which fashion perhaps became the only means of communication--one that could be relayed where it counted, on the six o'clock news or the front page of a newspaper. In a society where public relations is the preferred method of combat, the T-shirt is a fitting weapon for grassroots war. It provides the public space to make any snappy statement--preferably one with attitude--and so allows almost anyone to wield a measure of Madison Avenue's power. That such a mundane piece of clothing can do this points to its enduring relevance to American culture. For this reason, The Great American T-Shirt book does not exaggerate when it calls the T-shirt the "cotton chronicle" of our time. From chest-hair covering, to zeitgeist barometer, to fashion accessory, to political weapon--you've come a long way, baby.
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