Art vs. Mass Appeal

I buy into “beggars can’t be choosers” when I browse cheap daily shirt sites like Teefury, but really?  I can’t think of a single person, male or female, old or young, who would wear something like this.  What makes it even worse are the absolutely stunning selections from the designer’s portfolio, displayed right next to this tripe.  There’s something about making a joke out of debilitating, serious diseases like AIDs and SARS that just doesn’t sit well with me.  At all.  Yes, I get it, but it doesn’t make it funny.

I also love how Teefury chose to jump right into this after hosting a week of “artistic” designs clearly done to placate those who are sick of tired pop-culture references and cheap jokes.

I recall reading somewhere how the most-complained-about shirts were also the ones that sold the most.  From what I’ve seen at the Shirt.Woot forums, it’s very much the same situation over at that site as well: cutesy, mediocre designs trump creative, clever ones.  It’s understandable why these companies would do this — when you’re selling shirts for $9-10, you want to try to move as much stock as possible.  And this kind of mass-appeal stuff tends to do that.  Yet a lot of people go online to buy clothing — tees in particular — because they’re looking for something unique, something you can’t find at any big retailer or mall.  From the looks of it, Teefury gets a lot of submissions from talented artists — artists like the guy who created the above design — but they consciously turn down their incredible art for something much more bland and unappealing.  This is something I can’t wrap my head around; even Woot is more understandable in that they run a purely vote-based system for selecting Derby winners.

I’m not saying that companies should walk away entirely from mass-appeal designs, especially if it makes them money, but I’d hope at least that they choose the good ones.  There are some truly clever pop-culture tees out there that pique fans’ interest, yet manage to look like they weren’t pumped out in Photoshop in under ten minutes.  And unless a company is specifically focused on these kind of  shirts, it just looks bad to have a constant stream of them for weeks.

Luckily, these aren’t the only places to get cheap shirts — if your taste in designs demands something classier, allow me to recommend a few places.  RIPT Apparel consistently curates artistic, well-designed pieces.  Teextile is more expensive, but the designs are generally good and everything’s on American Apparel (they are still warming up, though, so I’m not sure if their shipping times have been rectified yet).  I also like quite a lot of the stuff at Tee Invaders, though they do use direct-to-garment printing instead of screenprinting.

Other great deals to checkout:

• Win 3 Tees from Young Lovers
• Shirtspotting: Return of Zombama, Paper Root, Dead Beat [Halloween Edition]
• ($)10/10/10 Sale at Threadless is Live
• Shirtspotting: Heiko Windisch, Go Ape, and Ugmonk
• Top 24 Announced for DBH 10K Contest