Social History Through T-shirts

Make that: teii shatsu. To be exact, Japanese shirts from the mid-1980s: the era of puffy youth fashion.

While my French is pretty basic, and word division aside, this seems perfectly fine. For that matter, when I've seen French used on Japanese objects, it has read like it was lifted from printed matter.

Then, as now, the usual practice for product decoration was to go with some version of English. If the French came from printed sources, the English equivalent was not exactly Shakespeare.

Meaningless scrawl, or "Repo"? As in, "Repo Man"? The movie is from 1984, so the timing works for me to have bought this 1985 or so.

At some point in those years I was told there had been a notorious drug bust of stationery designers. Tripping would go a long way toward explaining how they came up with wacky English for embellishing kids' pencil cases. Whether the story was truth or joke, it's brought to mind by this T-shirt verse. Which, for once, is admirably grammatical.

A puffy girl...

While Econo Size is impressive, it's hard to accept that she could heft it with only one tiny hand. Tiny because it's so out of scale, or to accentuate the chic puffiness of her outfit?

Some of the most unavoidable pop music of the mid-'80s was by a boy band whose members wore oversized, wiiiiide jackets. If I ever knew the band's name, it's long forgotten. As huge as Japanese pop culture is now, most stuff from my time in the country can't be found, at least not in English. Unfortunately, it was just a few years too pre-Internet.

My surviving mid-'80s T-shirts at least document the puffy fashion of the era.

Like so many other shirts, the collar of this one offers a bonus.

While it's doubtful that Japanese youth ever actually read the messages, this shirt did have good intentions. Too bad the execution didn't live up to them.