Shirt As Publication
Publishing is seen as a predominantly paper based medium. Charlie Ostrom and I teamed up to push the envelope of design and experimentation in the world of publication so it would include fabric based garments paired with a published book. “Shirt on my back” is a title that kept surfacing through the experiment. Showcasing anonymous stories that portray different emotions each week.
Our concept at a base was to use a shirt as a surface for publication. We would obtain different stories every other week and create a design that would then be screen printed on a shirt. We wanted to capture emotions that people felt through short stories, have them published on a shirt and be able to have that message carried with them wherever they went. We didn’t want it to be too personal or insensitive to the writer of the story so we kept this anonymous. With supplemental text on either sleeve we really wanted to push the idea of having an almost community feel to the shirt. The subject of human emotion is obviously something that every person has felt, we just wanted a new way of portraying that. With a front cover, side text and the story on the back, we tried to make use of all aspects to have this shirt seem like a portal into that week's theme.
We decided to make the shirts for sale alongside a companion book. The book is a shortened version of all 8 prints of “Shirt on my back.” The book was sold and with it a shirt was sent, randomly from one of the series.