Requiem for a Slogan Tee

Katie Way on life’s important choices—like what you choose to print on a shirt.

I spotted the first one while I was scrolling through the eBay shop of someone selling vintage Three6Mafia shirts. It was black Gildan t-shirt. On the back, a grid of photorealistic drawings of weed colas, each labeled with a different strain name, like “Early Girl Sativa” or “Colombian Gold.” On the front, a simple, elegant slogan right over the heart: “Life is Full of Important Choices.” 

HA, I thought. True. 

The shirt was priced at something like $90, but fine print under the back illustration—a 1997 copyright notice from a now-defunct clothing company called GI Apparel—gave me a thread to pull in search of a cheaper listing. I headed to the eBay search bar, typed in “life is full of important choices shirt 1997”—and smiled, surprised. It turns out, the artists over at GI Apparel dreamed up a whole spectrum of hobby objects to give the same treatment: cans of beer, bottles of liquor, golf courses, vintage cars, trains, guitars, drum kits, surf boards, motorcycles. Other than one feminine outlier (women’s shoes) it was a glittering array of vaguely male-coded choices. 

Even though I consider myself a frequent flier in the world of analog and online vintage t-shirt browsing, I’d had no idea these existed. The “Life Is Full of Important Choices” shirts belong to a subset of the greater graphic tee genre: They’re slogan t-shirts, designed to convey their message in the time it would take you to ride up a mall escalator behind someone wearing one.

From their purported 1939 debut on Emerald City workers in The Wizard of Oz, graphic t-shirts have been a platform for quick expression and in-group signaling; an easy way to speak volumes without having to really say anything. “This is my favorite sports team.” “I saw Beyoncé in concert and was willing to spend an extra $55 to prove it.” “This is who I’m voting for (serious).” “This is who I’m voting for (ironic).” “I blacked out on this Key West bar crawl in 2017.” The “Life Is Full of Important Choices” tees say: This shirt belongs to an enthusiast. The person wearing this shirt is serious about their leisure, revels in the pleasure of consumption—they understand that it’s important.

That jokey simplicity is oh-so late 90s, like one of the first slogan tees I remember loving as a child growing up in the DMV: a Maryland souvenir shirt with an angry-looking crustacean and the phrase “Don’t Bother Me, I’m Crabby.” 

The slogan tees du jour trend less accessible—in messaging and in price point—unless you know exactly what you’re looking for: Online Ceramics’s feel-good clipart psychedelia (RIP, kind of); the frenetic schematics of Boot Boyz Biz; the unlicensed PTA and Lynch merch for repertory theater types and Critereon Channel subscribers; the GOD’S FAVORITE and they don’t build statues of critics Praying baby tees, stretched taut over the torsos of Megan Thee Stallion and Charli XCX; and a sea of imitators, lapping at the heels of all the above. 

In certain venues or restaurants or corners of Instagram, these new-wave slogan tees feel inescapable. But how long until they, too, become dated, condemned to the $5 bins of fashion history? Todd Ferris, a GI Apparel alum who’s been designing t-shirts since 1983, didn’t know about any of those brands, and he’s the professional. When I asked Ferris to come up with a recent example, he landed on “hawk tuah”—“a young girl made a silly comment and now there’s millions of dollars worth of shirts running around.” According to Ferris, that’s the low-hanging fruit. (I can only guess what he’d think about shirts trying to capitalize on the already waning Catholicism revival.) Still, he had thoughts on what makes a slogan tee last.

“What makes a t-shirt best is when it’s not trying to grab onto something because it’s funny today, because people’s memories will forget it tomorrow,” he told me. “It’s something that reaches a little deeper back—it’s not good artwork, either. It’s the concept that sells a shirt: ‘Life is full of important choices’ is something that people have probably said for centuries.” 

Despite the former GI Apparel CEO’s briefly held trademark on the term, Ferris said the company was far from the first to slap it on a tee. “That term on shirts dates back 10, 15, 20 years before GI—it’s almost like Band Aid, or Xerox.” 

After I talked to Ferris, I felt humbled. I’d been naive, I’d had faith in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as an arbiter of originality. I assumed that just because I was discovering a delightful turn of phrase on a delightful line of shirts, that must have been the discovery. But upon reflection, “Life Is Full Of Important Choices” doesn’t work as a phrase pulled from the ether—it’s a rich text because it’s referential. The best slogan t-shirts don’t innovate. They wink and elbow you in the ribs.

What’s the most you can hope for, when you print something on a t-shirt? What can you dream that it will evoke as its vinyl transfer cracks and time’s ceaseless passage carries it further and further away from its original meaning? To cash in on whatever is dominating the zeitgeist—sure, for a little while. To launch a new trend, or pump new life into an old one, all well and good until Urban Outfitters rips your shit. Maybe, the most you can ask for is to create a kind of time capsule-slash-inside joke, legible until it’s not. Or maybe just a silent, timeless acknowledgment: Ha, true. 👕

Main image: still from The Wizard of Oz, 1939.

DIRT SHIRTS