Wondering why there are so many celebrity posts on HYA today? Look here for an explanation.

I don’t know what it is about Megan Fox (sidebar: how ridiculously good-looking is she?), but I’m inclined to believe that she actually does like Motley Crue, whereas I don’t think that Jessica Simpson and Paris Hilton are big fans of the Rolling Stones. It’s porbably because of her hair. All girls with black hair like Motely Crue, right?

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Tags » celebriteeday08 • Celebrities • hot model • megan fox • motley crue • music • retro • T-shirts • vintage

Wondering why there are so many celebrity posts on HYA today? Look here for an explanation.

I really, really wish I could find this design somewhere on the internet because I think its pretty cool, but alas, like so many of these celebritee posts that I’m running today, my searches are turning up nothing except for other blogs with the same images.

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Tags » celebriteeday08 • Celebrities • Hilary Duff • New York • NY • T-shirts • yellow

In case you can’t read the text, it says “Teenage Mutant Ninja: 80s Reference”. This tee pretty much sums up how I feel about tees that ape on cultural icons from my childhood. On the one hand, they’re usually a lot of fun, but on the other, they just seem a bit lazy, it sometimes feels as if a tee with a random 80s reference will be popular no matter how badly it is designed, so I’m glad to see the Diesel Sweeties crew making light of the trend.

Costiness=$18 Buy it at Diesel Sweeties [Photo credit: "Celebrating" Sarcasm Day by tiexano]

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Tags » 80s • American Apparel • diesel sweeties • flickr • funny • green • hanes • retro • T-shirts • teenage mutant ninja turtles • tiexano

[It has been raining rather a lot recently, so I don't think we'll be seeing many more tees photographed on the lawn for a while, which is a pity]

If you’re getting sick of the election campaigning, which seems to have been going on few at least fifty years now (and I am not exaggerating, at all), you might find the designs that are on sale at Retro Campaigns refreshing. As you may imagine from the name of the brand, they sell t-shirts that were designed for election campaigns from ‘back in the day’. Some of the people featured are star political names like Bobby Kennedy here, and some are less known like Barry Goldwater (I presume, I’d barely heard of him before, maybe he’s a big name in the US). I think there might also be a few designs in the shop that are based on political campaigns rather than from the actual campaigns themselves.

It feels odd to judge a design that was created well before I was born, but I really like it. I love the way that the vintage look of the tee makes it somehow more honest than political tees that we see today. The tees with the Obama logo on it just look so polished to me that its more like they’re a souvenir that you pick up in a gift shop rather than something that people wear in the interests of political activism. I’m not saying that campaign tees today should all be dipped in a vintage wash, technology has moved on and I’d probably have written a post about lame a political tee was if sold in this style by the Democrats of Republicans, but for some reason I find this tee more inspiring than whatever is officially released by the parties in this election.

As is the fashion, let’s talk quality. Again, as is the fashion, the tee itself is an American Apparel blank, so I presume that the vast majority of readers know what that’s all about (sizes run a little small, fairly long, soft, company run by a strange, strange man). Print quality is great, very soft, and the vintage look is so good that you may even be forgiven for thinking that the tee is ‘vintage’ rather than ‘vintage look’. In your package from Retro Campaigns you are also sent a pin button (not pictured, I only found it in the envelope after the photoshoot), a mini-catalogue, and also a couple of sheets of biographical information about the candidate your tee is based on, which I think is a nice little touch. Oh, and even their invoices are cool.

Costiness=$19.99 Buy it at Retro Campaigns

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Tags » American Apparel • Democrats • political • Republicans • retro • retro campagins • review • Reviews • Robert Kennedy • T-shirts • vintage • white

What? Did I just manage to go a whole week without writing about a tee from Local Celebrity? I guess you could say the same thing about going a whole week without seeing a tee that was about Voltron!

Anyway, here we are with yet another Voltron tee that gets a lot more love from my friends than the usual arty stuff that I usually cover my unnecessarily-hairy torso with (you got a mental image of that? awesome!). As with the other Voltron tees I’ve reviewed from Local Celebrity, this one is fully licensed and features artwork that accompanied the show when it was first broadcast on television, which I think it almost a necessity in a culture that’s as otaku as anime people and tee people can be.

So, you’re looking at this tee and thinking, “hey, they’re printed it in a burnout-esque kind of style” or perhaps “I wonder how they got that vintage look?” Well, this tee is actually printed completely normally… except the print is on the inside. Unusual right? So, if you turn it inside out it looks like a regular t-shirt with the writing backwards, but I think that it gives it a good look, not necessarily a vintage look, but something reminiscent of a vintage look, which may or may not make sense to you. If you’re worried about having the print going directly onto your chest and the problems that you cause, you can’t feel the print at all, and the tee itself is super soft as well, in case you’d forgotten my gushingly positive reviews of their tee quality in the past.

Costiness=$27 Buy it at Local Celebrity

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Tags » 80s • anime • cartoons • Local Celebrity • retro • review • Reviews • T-shirts • vintage • voltron • white

I was watching Entourage last night (we’re only a week behind here in the UK, which unusually close for us) and I spotted Viking Quest’s very own Johnny Drama wearing a tee that I just knew would be on the internet somewhere…

… and I was right! The design is by Worn Free, who recreate designs that were famously worn by musical heroes from ‘back in the day’ such as such as Kurt Cobain, Debbie Harry (who I once saw stood on the street in Amsterdam - true story) and this design, which was worn by Lester Bangs, a man I first encountered when he was played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in my favourite movie of all time, Almost Famous, who was in Mission Impossible 3 with Tom Cruise, who was in A Few Good Men with Kevin Bacon.

It ain’t a cheap tee, but if you want to look like Johnny Drama then I’m pretty sure you’ve got bigger things to worry about than the amount a t-shirt costs.

Costiness=$40 Buy it here @ Worn Free

Oh, and do you like my TV? 52 glorious inches! If only ITV broadcast entourage in HD.

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Tags » Celebrities • entourage • grey • johnny drama • lester bangs • music • retro • T-shirts • television • text • worn free

I like to think that Hide Your Arms has exposed me to a whole new world in which t-shirts are just something that you wear, they can often be wearable art. I love wearing tees by my favourite artists, and my friends usually take a look and give an approving nod but aren’t too interested, however, when I’m wearing a t-shirt with some kind of pop culture reference on it they all go crazy, I think that there must be a part of the brain in people born during the early 80s that wakes up when they see anything that reminds them of the decade that fashion forgot. I didn’t think that Voltron was all that popular here in the UK, but pretty much everyone I met recognised it, one person hummed the theme tune, and whenever someone said “hey, is that Transformers?” they were scolded by all around them. In short, Voltron is more popular than you’d think, and people still love pop culture related tees.

It’s fairly hard for me to comment on the actual design of this tee, because it isn’t original art, its a direct lift of a promotional image for the GoLion version of Voltron (when you get sent so many Voltron tees its fairly hard to not get into the mythology of the show). I guess its a pretty cool image, but I can’t really say much more about it than that, because you have to remember that when this show did its original run I couldn’t speak and the height of fashion for me was a onesie.

You may well have noticed from the pictures that the print isn’t completely as you’d expect it to be. Instead of it being the regular print, there are starburst style dots all over it. On the text the starburst is printed in colour, but on Lion Voltron the starburst just shows through to the green of the t-shirt. I can’t quite work out why they’d do this, maybe it helps with the overall vintage look. I haven’t got any problem with it, but its probably something that Voltron obsessed tee fans would want to be aware of. The quality of the tee is fantastic as it always is with Local Celebrity, you know how something that’s good is described as being ‘top notch’? Well, LC are sat on top of the top notch.

Costiness=$27 Buy it at Local Celebrity

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Tags » cartoon • green • Local Celebrity • pop culture • retro • review • Reviews • T-shirts • vintage • voltron