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?

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

I like it!

Costiness=€16 Buy it at A Better Tomorrow

• 3 Comments
Tags » a better tomorrow • advert • American Apparel • futuristic • grey • Mens • retro • T-shirts • vintage • Womens

[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

• 0 Comments
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

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

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

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

Y’know, you leave a company alone for a few months and the next time you check in they’ve gone and had a facelift, its like when you see a girl you know from high school that has become almost inexplicably hot (not that Vintage Vantage was an uggo to start with). They’ve also got a load of new tees for you to enjoy (only a few of which are in the above gallery), some of which don’t seem all that vintage in their style, although perhaps ‘vintage’ style has pervaded society so completely that their designs are vintage, and I just can’t tell anymore.

Vintage Vantage

• 0 Comments
Tags » funny • Mens • New Designs • new site • releases • retro • T-shirts • vintage • Vintage Vantage • Womens

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

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

Argentina’s finest have released seven fresh designs that keep up their tradition of paying homage to some of their favourite movies and bands. My particular favourite from this crop of tees is “The Dark Side Of Oz” which is based upon the urban legend that Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon matches up with The Wizard of Oz at certain points, I’ve never put them together myself, but I’d presume that you need to have taken a lot of drugs to see/hear it.

Waterloo

• 1 Comment
Tags » argentina • mashup • Mens • movies • music • T-shirts • vintage • waterloo • Womens

Retro Campaigns have released seven new tees, based upon their winning formula of popular political designs from the past, which I’m sure you guys might find refreshing if you’re feeling a bit of political burnout from the relentless coverage of Obama vs McCain.

Retro Campaigns

• 0 Comments
Tags » political • retro • retro campaigns • T-shirts • vintage

PTnK stands for “Peace, Tolerance, ‘n Kindness”, which I must admit put me off this brand a little bit, the name’s a bit flowery for me, but I guess that when you’re a company trying to put a positive message out there then it needs to be in your name too. I really admire people that make a t-shirt line based on what they really believe in rather than what they think will sell well, because in my experience tees with a message can often be a tough sell. Although that’s usually because the message is put ahead of the design, but I think that PTnK have achieved a happy medium in that they’ve got some really cool designs, often in a vintage style, and the message isn’t rammed down your throat.

If you’re wondering what this message is that I’m yammering on about, PTnK is a women’s only t-shirt line that is trying to get away from designs that cheapen women, such as t-shirts that say “Daddy’s Little Slut” (I can’t believe that t-shirt actually exists, and on a lot of sites too).

PTnK

• 0 Comments
Tags » message • PTnK • T-shirts • vintage • Womens