It’s a strange business, getting dressed. We’re encouraged to express ourselves, then advised to tone it down. Find our voice. Consider the neighbours. Wear something memorable, preferably not something anyone will remember too clearly.
Meanwhile, everyone seems to have bought the same beige trousers.
In an Ibiza studio, a different wardrobe problem is developing. There are drawings everywhere. A boy with a guitar. A sentence that probably should have stayed in the sketchbook. Put them on cotton and suddenly they’re leaving the house.
This is roughly how Shirt Happens began.
Ibiza gets a lot of credit for helping people find themselves. In our case, it helped uncover several drawings, a questionable sense of humour and a growing reluctance to put either back in a drawer. Some ideas arrived fully formed. Others needed redrawing. A few became considerably funnier after they were supposed to have been finished.
Eventually, there were T-shirts.
A T-shirt is a fairly quiet object until you put something on it. Then it starts doing things. Someone across the room smiles. A friend asks where you found it. A stranger at a bar reads your chest and feels entitled to an explanation. You were only going out for a drink. Now there’s a discussion.
We like that part.
There’s something appealing about sending a drawing into the world on someone else’s shoulders. In the studio, you know what you meant. Out there, it meets someone with a completely different afternoon behind them. They find another joke in it. Or take it seriously. Or buy it for a friend who really shouldn’t be encouraged.
The collection grows that way: humour, a little rebellion, the occasional encounter between the sacred and the badly behaved. Things we’d rather draw than explain, although we’re beginning to suspect the explaining will happen anyway.
Of course, there’s always someone telling you what to wear. Usually someone selling clothes. We’re selling clothes too, so take this as you wish: choose the one you keep looking at. See what happens when you leave the house in it.
Depending on the company, bring a jacket.
Shirt Happens. Born in Ibiza. Worn elsewhere.