The Personality Test in Your Closet
As a wearer of novelty T-shirts and lifelong collector of stuff, I’ve amassed quite a lot of tees over the years. A family road trip to the Ben & Jerry’s factory one summer in the 1990s netted a bright, tie-dyed number, while a recent pandemic acquisition, a forest-green long-sleeved tee, came from Mystic Muffin, a Toronto restaurant famous for its apple cake. I’ve misplaced the former somewhere in storage, but wear the latter all the time in cooler weather.
Novelty tees are consumer items, of course, meant to extend a brand. But they are also embedded with stories; they make our histories physical and known, like wearable pictures that show a specific time, place, from shops and restaurants forced to suspend in-person operations. named the trend of sporting such gear “” (after the dermatologist whose ads were for years ubiquitous on the New York City subway), a paean to authenticity and an unabashed pride for hyper-local brands that is more about feeling a sense of belonging than about any particular transaction. But the tendency didn’t just crest in that difficult moment. Buying, collecting, and wearing merch has long been a way for loyal customers to show their pride and do a little marketing on the way.
