Postmodern Tshirt

We asked our scientificologists what it would take to make the ultimate postmodern shirt. A t-shirt that would lash out against the modernism and all the celebration of the human spirit that the era entailed.

After a little head-scratching and some quick tabulation, our crack team realized that the best way to create a post-modern tee shirt would be to imbue a t-shirt with a sense of self.

Much like that which separates humans from most other animals (notice that we said "most"), an awareness of yourself is usually all that is necessary in creating a cynical, individualistic object that is able to question the nature of knowledge.

When you wear the postmodern tshirt, are you really wearing a t-shirt or has it become something more than through it's self-referential nature?

Of course, most of us at The Outpost aren't smart enough to fully understand our scientificologists response to our question, but that's not going to stop us from putting it on a t-shirt.

Couldn't this be, we wonder, a post-modern response to the surrealistic and poignant work of René Magritte? Whereas Magrittes' Ceci n'est pas works point out that "that no matter how closely, through realism-art, we come to depicting an item accurately, we never do catch the item itself, per se, as a Kantian noumenon, but capture only an image on the canvas," this t-shirt is, in fact, the object which it represents, sending the truly pensive viewer in an unceasing spiral of refracted thought.

The shirt itself becomes both an ironic work of art as well as a snide answer to the multitude of ironic shirts that are in vogue among the hipsters and popularity-challenged fashion obsessed.

(BTW, if you're not familiar with the term "Hipster", this short introduction from Wikipedia should suffice: "A hipster is an individual who avoids and often explicitly rejects whatever is seen as mainstream or corporate in nature, instead embracing alternative forms of expression. Often, these alternative forms quickly become mainstream or corporate themselves, thus creating an arms race between the genuinely trendy and the 'played out.' Indeed, even the label 'hipster' is no longer desirable, and it is rarely used for self-identification, except in an ironic or self-deprecating way.")

In respecting this ironic anti-irony, we have also intentionally placed this text, "postmodern tshirt", on some mugs and apparel items that are certainly not t-shirts. Take that Magritte!

Of course, this is just what we understand this week's sale design to mean. For all we know, the scientificologists have just pulled the wool over our eyes again and gotten away with another easy pay check.