Fantastic Blognanza!

It looks like the dudes over at StolenShirts have started up a new line (or sub-brand, or whatever you want to call it) of statistic-inspired shirts. They call it StatAttak, and the specific statistics in question are some very depressing numbers that come from sub-Saharan Africa. Here’s an example of one of the designs, to give you an idea of what the tees are like:

And here’s a close-up:

There are currently five different t-shirts, each featuring a different sort of statistic from a different African nation: Angola, Botswana, Burundi, Mozambique, and Zambia.

But what’s the point of it all? Well, here’s their explanation:

[...]StatAttak - a t-shirt line based on statistics that people should be aware of. This way people would become walking billboards for these stats, and they would help spread the word. The hope is that once you see these numbers, you can’t help but want to change them.

A lofty goal, certainly. The shirts themselves look quite nice—printed on American Apparel tees, with bold and eye-catching stylized visual representations of the statistics presented on each shirt.* They are also fairly moderately priced at $25. (Since I haven’t personally met any of the shirts, I can’t attest to their hand. Their handedness? How would I say that? “How soft the print is,” at any rate.)

When Joe first pointed me toward the site—I’ll be honest—I was a little irked. Mainly, it was that the statistics themselves are absolutely dwarfed by the rest of the designs. Wearing one of these tees is hardly going to make anyone a “walking billboard”; rather, upon seeing one of these shirts in the wild, I would probably think to myself: “Zambia86? Is that a band?**”

It’s like shouting at the top of a whisper. It’s like painting mile-high letters in invisible ink. It’s like hiding your thesis in a footnote. It kind of defeats the purpose of the whole thing in the first place.

Now this isn’t so bad in and of itself, but it leads to a deeper concern: the risk of reducing something as ponderous as human suffering to a mere fashion statement. It’s one of my main objections to the whole [PRODUCT]^RED campaign (which I know Joe could probably write a whole series of rants about, but about which I won’t get into detail about right now). Essentially, by placing such a huge emphasis on the design, I worry that you run the risk of marginalizing the message.

This initial reaction was admittedly overly cynical, and I’ve since considerably tempered my judgement, for a few reasons. For one, there’s something to be said for subtlety. Ultimately, I’m glad that they didn’t just pound us over the head with a size 6000 font message that said, “AFRICA = :–(”. The impact on someone who has to examine the design closely to fully divine its meaning is arguably more powerful than on someone who merely needs to glance, read, and turn away. If the design were too blatant, the audience might just roll their eyes and dismiss the wearer as “one o’ them dagnabbed liberals.” (Yes, apparently I’m worried about Jed Clampett being dismissive of my t-shirts.)

Most important, however, is this little bit from the bottom of their website:

Since Mozambique was the country that inspired all of this, the Sons of Stolen are putting 20% of the money from the sale of the shirts towards building an orphanage in Mozambique. Instead of giving the money to a charity, we will go to Mozambique with a group of volunteers from the design industry and build an orphanage from the ground up.

That’s downright respectable, and I think it resolves most of those qualms I had before.

So my final verdict? Hearty approval. But what do I matter? Go on over to StatAttak and see for yourself.

* I guess that’s just a fancy way of saying “graph”.
** And it probably is.