Hinton: ‘Say Hello’ tees an egregious fashion faux-pas

It is no secret that T-shirts with sayings on them make their wearers into rubes. Nothing communicates such lamentable cultural ignorance as walking around with “That’s what she said” splayed across your chest.

Now, if this little tirade I’m starting off on sounds tired, you are exactly right. As American Apparel and Urban Outfitters whitewash the torsos of young adults with bright, solid colors, the sun begins to set on the rein of No Fear, Big Johnsons, the Hot Topic franchise. All seems to be well.

Until you walk down Forbes Avenue.

Lining the shop windows on the way to campus are rows of mannequins sporting “Say Hello to my Little Friend” slogan tees, emblazoned with Pitt’s Roc mascot looking mean as hell. I’ll spare you the overwrought account of how I was stunned by this hideous coterie and leave the issue at my conclusion: These shirts don’t make any sense.

Panthers are anything but little. Pitt has no special connection to Cuba, drug lords or Brian de Palma, and it is completely unclear who the addressee is.

In fact, these shirts are so feverishly nonsensical that I can only imagine them as the result of the following scene:

“Hey, Bob, deadline is today for those shirt designs.”

“Well, Theodore, I didn’t make any shirts but I really think these sportive boxer shorts will sell.”

“What do they say? ‘Say Hello to my Little Friend’? That’s disgusting and completely the wrong thing to advertise but, damn it, we need something. All right, blow it up and put it on some shirts. Add a panther. Freshmen will eat that up.”

Now, normally, the sartorial shortcomings of Pitt’s campus would never warrant an entire column. However, such bottom-of-the-inspiration-barrel apparel is worrisome for reasons beyond making young students look like tools.

“Say Hello to my Little Friend” tees are a bellwether pointing the way to new heights of cultural indolence.

Stupid fashion is nothing new. The ’80s were a decade devoted to pushing the boundary between clothing and flotsam and jetsam (cf. “Breakin” and “Breakin 2: Electric Boogaloo”). The ’90s similarly wrapped trash up in a cutesy label, “grunge,” and the transition to the aughts (2000-2009) brought in a slew of ironic fashions (the sarcastic shirt, the romper, big glasses).

However, what separates these cultural indiscretions from the new Pitt shirts is that usually silly fashion ties up with some broader cultural move. The absurdity of Boogaloo Shrimp’s clothing or that of the chubby girl whose crew neck alleges, “I slept with your boyfriend,” is at least marginally coherent within its own community (breakers, party chicks, etc.). Even the clothing at the very outermost edges of sense — for instance Armani Exchange graphic tees with golden dragons printed over newspaper and old English — carves out a little niche for its devotees.

“Say Hello to my Little Friend,” however, makes pains not to be recognizable. It is so vanilla as to almost be an event horizon out of which no traces of personality or culture may escape.

I am sure similar lines have been penned about other superficially similar fashion, such as the equally strange Abercrombie/Hollister/American Eagle tees. Compare though, Abercrombie’s somewhat new shirt that boasts in bold letters, “Fiscally Republican, Socially Democrat, Sexually Liberal.” At first, you might think, “Oh, just another sex joke from the boys at A&F.” I, too, thought I was above Abercrombie’s shirt until I remarked, guffawing, “Isn’t that what every Abercrombie shirt says implicitly anyway?” Then, it dawned on me: That’s the point. Red-faced, I knew Abercrombie had won.

Digressions aside, what this experience taught me was that a lot of thought goes into making a clothing line that seems like no thought went into it. Creating culture that is shallow on top but rooted in legitimate thought is hard work. It’s sleight-of-hand, a magic show with less masks and less (read: just as many) scantily clad women.

The Pitt shirt plumbs new depths to make a shirt that is neither understandable nor founded on any cultural idea.

The danger in such seemingly benign fashion is not that it encourages bad culture — there is no such thing. It encourages people to trade culture for a hodgepodge of vaguely cultural references (in this case, a school, a football team and “Scarface”). Such a move frustrates the ostensible end of culture, to bring people together, and tries to trade being in a certain culture for just being in culture.

Now, I am surely being unfair. You could very well ask, “What really is culture besides ‘a hodgepodge of vague references’?” I would not object too strongly. Furthermore, as much as I would like to say that the “Little Friend” shirts are outside of any specific culture, they could very easily be integrated into one.

The point is, though, that culture and all of its trappings, even silly shirts, deserve attention and energy. Maybe you are the kind of person who doesn’t value fashion or looking any specific way, but know that that, too, is a cultural decision. Do not underestimate its significance by supporting lazy cultural products.

E-mail Erik at ech15@pitt.edu.