The passage of my life is measured out in shirts

[imomus]

For reasons too complicated to go into, but mostly tied up with my nomadic lifestyle over the past few years and space constraints in a New York apartment too small for a swinging cat, I was only re-united with my stuff -- 59 boxes full of personal effects -- yesterday. The first box I opened was full of clothes from ten years ago, mostly t-shirts. Some of them are still wearable, some aren't, but each has a history and brings back its own memories.

I've made a Flickr Slideshow of me modeling this t-shirt time capsule. For captions explaining the history of each shirt and whether I'd still wear it today, click the "i" at the centre of the first photo (you might want to click "slow" too).

The entry headline comes, of course, from Brian Eno's song "King's Lead Hat":

The killer cycles, the kilohertz
The passage of my life is measured out in shirts

And the more semantics there are on the shirt, the more that's true. What could be more rooted in a particular time, place and sensibility than a t-shirt?

When I dug these out and started modeling them for Hisae, I told her that many of them were too retro-70s to be worn now. "But the 70s might come back," she said. What, again?

Lightning doesn't strike twice! The 70s came back in the 90s, so it couldn't possibly come back again now. That fancy vampire is firmly nailed into his coffin. But the 90s themselves, in the form of, say, Shibuya-kei, that could respectably be revived. And, at a pinch -- and only for the real cognoscenti -- it might be possible to revive the-70s-as-they-appeared-in-the-90s, as long as you were able to distinguish that from the 70s themselves.

Comments

Re: aquarists unite - we have nothing to lose but our signs

[(Anonymous)]

I've always thought that the neo-psych leanings of the 2000s was a part of the greater 80s revival. It's interesting how different decades and aesthetics somehow sync up in not necessarily obvious ways with each other by way of a later decade of revivalism.

Re: aquarists unite - we have nothing to lose but our signs

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Well, there were bands in the 80's that borrowed the worst aspects of old psych, but hybrids like that tend to be sterile--citable, but unable to bear fruit.

At any moment, about three or four period styles are being reused. The most naff, "incorrect" ones often yield the most interesting results.