T-shirts can be decorated with text and/or pictures, and are sometimes used to advertise.
Not to knock Star Trek or nothin’, but Jayne’s T-shirts instantly made the future far more believable than any blandly newage councillor’s gown or ostentatiously homespun Jedi robes. It’s a future that keeps in mind clothing as she is worn: not just ceremonial formalwear and peasant uniforms, but everything in between, the knockabout workaday clothing you catch as you can, adorned with the serendipitious poetics only mass-produced things can provide. Proletarian chic, to re-appropriate a phrase.
I mention this because among the many things the Spouse does well in Dicebox is precisely this sort of practical imagineering: what do you wear when you don’t make your clothing yourself (or have it made for you)? What options are possible in a future of better fabrics and showier printing techniques?
All of which is a long-winded way of saying her ladies wear some fine T-shirts:
Now, the Spouse has done her bit to bring the future into the here-and-now by handrolling her own small-batch runs of T-shirts, but in addition to better fabrics and showier printing techniques, the future will bring us (has already brought) new ways of designing and distributing these quotidian goods. —I mean, basically, all of this has been a long-winded way of saying the Spouse has begun posting designs to Threadless.
You know how it works, right? Sign up for an account, then peruse the available designs; vote up the ones you like, vote down the ones you don’t, and those that are sufficiently juiced get printed as T-shirts and posters which you can then purchase and add to your quiver of mass-produced, knockabout, workaday poetics. And if you’ve ever looked at a page of Dicebox and said damn I want that shirt, add jemale to your watchlist and vote vote vote.
Fun T-shirt facts! A life cycle study of one T-shirt brand shows that the CO2 emissions from a T-shirt is about 4 kilograms (8.8 pounds)—including the growing of the cotton, manufacturing and wholesale distribution. The loss of natural habitat potential from the T-shirt is estimated to be 10.8 square meters (116 square feet).
