Destroy your t-shirts

Trashing them is the entire point

Cover photo via burnedout.co.uk 

In Tsarist Russia, Carl Faberge made a series of 52 bejeweled eggs to celebrate the reigns of emperors Alexander III and Nicholas II. Faberge and a team of 500 jewelers used crystal, platinum and diamonds to recreate frost on the Winter Egg, which was studded with 1,660 diamonds and opened up to reveal a basket of flowers crafted from platinum, gold, white quartz and demantoid (the basket itself was studded with another 1,378 diamonds).

A few hundred years earlier in Germany, Augustus the Strong of Saxony threw an alchemist named Johann Friedrich Böttger in prison so he’d give up the secret to making gold. Böttger couldn’t do it, but in the process he discovered a way of replicating Chinese porcelain, which led to the founding of the Meissen porcelain factory. In Dresden’s Porzellansammlung, you’ll find a ceramic menagerie made entirely of pure white Meissen porcelain, including a lion, elephant, parrot and pelican, as well as a diorama of the death of Saint Xavier.

What does this have to do with t-shirts? Nothing, literally nothing. T-shirts are not Faberge eggs or Meissen ceramics. They are pieces of fabric stitched together to cover your body and, maybe, say something about who you are as a person. They are objects for living in and sweating in, for spilling drinks on and throwing into washing machines. They are not valuable heirlooms to be treasured like a vase from the Qing dynasty. Trashing them is the entire point.

T-shirts are one of the most undervalued and overproduced products of our time. They are made without thought or care, spewed out into the world to celebrate runs, conferences and group holidays. We accumulate mountains of them, men especially. Buying t-shirts has always been a bit of a thing for the streetwear guys, the metalheads and the skaters, but the habit has spread much further now. 

People make tees as a side hustle to the main hustle. Creative people love the idea of making something physical, and a t-shirt is the most obvious way to do that. Maybe they’ll sell out! Our record label/podcast/kombucha/craft ale could be the next Supreme!

It’s not my job to say who can or cannot make t-shirts, or what kind of t-shirts we should be wearing. It’s okay to have a lot of T-shirts, and it’s okay to buy them. The only thing that matters is that you wear them a lot. And if you want to make them, then it’s your responsibility to make them so good that people are still wearing them years later. Making merch just because your boss likes the idea of everyone at the company get-together wearing the same thing for a day is dumb and needs to stop.

We have a tendency to assume that new activities always require new products. We need new tees for our holiday next week, for the gym, for running. Another way of looking at it is…just wear the ones you already have. That’s the whole point in t-shirts — that you can do anything in them. Wear yours so much that the screenprint cracks into an unrecognizable mess, the black turns to gray, the seams come undone and the collar frays into nothingness.

The problem is, most people don’t. When our entire culture buys into the idea that clothes are a disposable novelty, something to be made for the moment then forgotten, we end up with t-shirts everywhere. Clogging wardrobes, spilling out of donation bins, and dumped on the other side of the world, where they become an economic and environmental disaster for someone else to deal with. There are so many t-shirts in this world that brands like Buziga Hill can build an entire business out of taking bad t-shirts and remaking them into good t-shirts.

Clothes are meant to be worn. Sure, some garments are beautiful and delicate and gorgeous and should only be brought out for special occasions, but tees, just like anything made of denim or leather, get better the more you wear them. There’s a reason vintage ones are so expensive — because all that patina, all that wear and tear, gives so much character to something that began life as a very ordinary object.

T-shirts are not precious artifacts, they’re very simple garments, and it’s your job as a human being to sweat in them, rip them, spill shit on them, be downright abusive to them. Live your life in them.