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

You’ll be seeing quite a lot more of Local Celebrity in the next few weeks, I arrived home one day to find quite a large box waiting for me that had 9 of their tees in it. To prevent you from getting Local Celebrity burnout I’m going to be spreading out the reviews over the next few weeks (interspersed with a few reviews for other brands) and I’ve had a few ideas for fun photoshoots too, which should keep things interesting. The first tee I’ve picked out of the big box has the logo of popular (though surprisingly short-lived) Japanese anime series Voltron on it. It’s amazing how many tees I wear that have really beautiful illustrations on them that get no notice from my friends, and then I wear a tee with an TV logo on it and all my friends go nuts. I guess that’s the power of a TV tee.

Fans of HYA (hey fans, love you!) will know that the second paragraph is usually where I talk about the design, but since this is the logo from the TV show, and a TV show that’s a month older than I am, then I don’t really know what to do. Whilst I doubt that a logo of this style would make it onto a TV show today, I think that its stood up pretty well to the tests of time and does work pretty well on a tee.

Usually when you see a tee like this, merchandise based on a TV show from the 80s, you wouldn’t usually expect much in terms of quality. That definitely is not the case with Local Celebrity. This is without a doubt one of the finest tees that I’ve ever had the pleasure to wear, I often hear people describing a soft tee as being soft like butter, but I think that might actually be doing this tee a disservice. I don’t know what goes into the special vintage wash they apply to each tee, but it must be some pretty special sauce. The fit is practically perfect for me, about the same width as an American Apparel tee, perhaps a touch smaller but a bit also slightly stretchier (so it evens out), and a little bit shorter in the body.

Embarassingly, I can’t remember what the name of the printing process is. You can’t feel the print at all, which makes me think its discharge print, but then I thought that you couldn’t get discharge to produce colours like that. Any chance a tee producer could enlighten me with their expert knowledge? Whatever the printing technique is, it feels damn good, and that’s the most important thing.

Costiness=$27 Buy the tee here

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Tags » anime • cartoon • Japanese • Local Celebrity • logo • mecha • retro • review • Reviews • T-shirts • television • vintage • voltron

At the weekend after my friends and I had a very late brunch in Manchester I dragged them to the rather fantastic Urbis building to check out an exhibition called ‘How Manga Took Over the World’, which, as you’d imagine, was all about how Japanese graphic design style has influenced us in the West. I know purists will probably be a bit annoyed they called it ‘Manga’ rather than ‘anime’, but I let it slide since they probably just wanted it to sound more accessible. I only persuaded two of my friends to join me inside (the rest waited in the little park outside) despite it being a free exhibition, in fact, all the exhibitions at the Urbis are free. I don’t actually know much about anime, but I do know that I like the work of Terratag, Tado and Jon Burgerman, and those guys were represented in abundance, as well as several other artists that I recognised but can’t remember off the top of my head. The exhibition isn’t actually that big, I got around it in about 20 minutes, though I was rushing and not reading the explanations since I didn’t like to keep my friends waiting indulging my own interests whilst they drank medicinal Starbucks to alleviate the effects of the previous nights drinking. If you’re in Manchester city centre for any reason over the next few months (the exhibition runs until September 27th) then I highly recommend checking it out.

Click on through for a load of pictures (mostly shot from the hip since I was unsure of the photo policy).

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Tags » anime • art • exclusives • exhbition • japan • jon burgerman • manchester • manga • T-shirts • tado • terratag