Fantastic Blognanza!

Enclothe sourced their distressed tees for Eternal Embrace from Alternative Apparel, who manufacture a range of “destroyed” and “burnedout” tees. You can read a bunch about the inspiration, design, and printing process that went into this tee over at the Enclothe blog; it’s a good read!

Pre-distressed t-shirts, like the ones you can find at Abercrombie & Fitch (don’t worry, I don’t shop there), seem to be all the rage these days. I’m guessing it started out with faux-distressed printing before it moved to pre-distressed garments. I was never really big on this concept. I like wearing t-shirts until they get natural wear from normal washing (it’s not that I’m going for this look; it just happens because I wear t-shirts a lot). The “my clothes look like crap, even though they’re really expensive” look never made too much sense to me. (I’m guessing it’s akin to the “I only buy things second-hand/vintage, even though I have plenty of money” look. I think they’re both basically iterations of the “I’m rich enough that I can dress however I want” look. It goes along with upper middle class people speaking with less prestigeful forms than lower middle class people… but enough sociolinguistics!) That distressed apparel has been becoming increasingly available for non-exorbitant prices kind of throws a wrench in those gears, but it’s not so problematic once you consider how much people emulate the wealthy. I would not be surprised by a shift from tattered jeans to something else as the dominant style of dress for the upper-middleclass in response.

Oddica had the thermal long sleeve tees for their Ping Pong Grinded Thermal custom-sewn, probably from either American Apparel or Alternative Apparel.

There is, however, I feel an intrinsic difference between the value of a shirt that you’ve worn and washed so often that it’s tattered than the value of a shirt that you bought pre-tattered. For the pre-distressed shirt, the distress is “cool” or is part of some sort of persona/image that you are trying to present to the world. The shirt which is tattered because of its history of use is valuable precisely because of that: its history. It may remind you of that amazing show you went to, or when you met your best friend, when you bowled a 300, whatever. It’s that thing called “sentimental value”, I suppose. I wouldn’t be surprised if this concept of “sentimental value” arose because of the fetishization of commodities and the alienation of the product from the mode of production and the workers themselves. When the value of things are reduced to purely a dollar value, perhaps a desire to re-humanize the process of consumption leads to things like sentimental value being attributed to select objects.

I’m not sure where the distressed trend originated (maybe it had something to do with “vintage” fashion, or some iteration of/response to punk), but faux-distressed printing spread fairly quickly to items in mainstream department stores, and pre-distressed apparel followed. T-shirt brands that are significantly less mainstream than the likes of Abercrombie, Gap, and Macy’s (a reasonable progression of the trend in my mind) have been selling faux-distress prints for a while. But only lately have they started (or at least have I noticed them) printing on pre-distressed apparel. Maybe it’s just because I saw two new ones in a 24-hour period that I noticed it.