Okay, this is the last of the Voltron tees that I received from Local Celebrity, considering I wasn’t a massive fan of the show when I was a kid my wardrobe certainly paints an entirely different story of events, with Voltron now commanding a 2.5% share of my tee closet (and tee rack, and tee pile-on-a-chair) space.

I’ve got to admit, this is probably my least favourite of the Voltron tees that I received. There’s nothing particularly wrong with it, but I think that it has the least interest to someone that isn’t a fan of the show since its a bit less flashier than the others. Having said that, I do like the retro look to this tee, it keeps things simple, and it does actually look pretty good when you’re wearing it. Red tees can be a bit of a struggle for some people, but I think that matching it with the yellow and white colourway works pretty well.

As you can probably tell from the relative brevity of the design review above, I’m struggling to get excited about this tee, even though I thought that looked pretty cool when I wore it on a night out. I still think that the quality of Local Celebrity’s t-shirts is something to get excited about, however. Exceptionally soft cotton, well-fitting (a little bit boxier than American Apparel), soft print, and I know for a fact that they last very well too.

Costiness=$27 Buy it at Local Celebrity

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Tags » Local Celebrity • red • review • Reviews • T-shirts • voltron

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 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

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