The Golden Age of the T-Shirt (6/18/2000)

We always seem to have trouble coming up with a name to call our own time. Usually, everyone refers to the years they lived in as the "modern period" or the "present." This presents obvious problems for academics, who, seeking to separate the recent present from the past present still in memory, create terms like "post-modernism" or "post-post-modernism" or "postal office of the future," a very nice post office with robotic stamps that affix themselves to letters and parcels.

However, a thousand years from now in the post(x10000)-modern era, the latter twentieth century and early twenty-first century will probably not be known as the "modern" or the "post-modern" era. Some visionaries like to think our time will be remembered as the "Age of the Internet" or the "Information Age." Take a look at The Age of Access : The New Culture of Hypercapitalism to see an example of this kind of techno-centric weltenschaung.

Yet, if we look back at previous centuries, we find that time periods are rarely named "eCommerce Revolution" or anything like that. No, they have names like "Dark Ages", "Renaissance", "Enlightenment", "Age of Exploration" and so forth. Instead of "http://timePeriod.com", our era will probably have a more conventional historical label. Probably something like "Renaissance II".

And in fact, the whole Renaissance thing was invented hundreds of years after the Renaissance, in the 19th century, by Jacob Burckhardt, showing once again that people never come up with good names for their own period. But I still have to think our era will be remembered best for its dominant and most radical cultural achievement, the T-Shirt. In no other time have people attained such an monumental garment technology and culture. Dress in our own time is simultaneously democratized and multi-varied. Everyone can wear a T-Shirt, and there are an infinite variation of colors, designs, logos and prints which will symbolize to the ages a reaffirmation of humanity's inherent individuality. All strata of our society are blessed with the personal agency to express themselves via T-Shirts, from "If You Can't Run With The Big Dogs Get Off The Porch" to "I'm With Stupid" to "Big Johnson: Liquor In The Front, Poker In The Rear" to "Yuck Fale". Never before in history have the masses had such a freewheeling venue for personal expression.

So express yourself in this, the Golden Age of T-Shirts. Wear T-Shirts with pride, knowing that you are a pioneer into a brand new, silk-screened frontier. And, for the ultimate expression of your personal agency, print your own T-Shirts, described in How to Print T-Shirts for Fun and Profit. The world changed forever when James P. Applethorpe invented the T-Shirt. Humanity's path, and the future of T-Shirts, remains unknown. Make that future a good one.

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