The t-shirt: fashion's most opinionated garment

The humble white T-shirt has come a long way since its first reference in F Scott Fitzgerald’s 1920 debut novel This Side of Paradise. Controversial, sexy, political, ironic and just plain cool, it is fashion’s most accurate and expressive reflector of cultural shift, and, naturally, its most opinionated. Showing more than 100 such examples, London’s Fashion and Textile Museum is displaying some of the rarest and most influential in T-Shirt: Cult – Culture – Subversion, including originals by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, alongside other designers and artists including Simon Barnzley Armitage, Pam Hogg, Jeremy Deller, Jamie Reid, Guerrilla Girls, Hoid, Cute Circuit and Experimental Jetset. Our favourite shows designer Katharine Hamnett (above left) sporting a T-shirt with a nuclear missile protest message (“58% Don’t Want Pershing”) in March 1984, while shaking hands with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Ironically, Hamnett later said the danger with T-shirts is that they “give people the feeling they have done something when they haven’t.” 

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