In 1984, Katherine Hamnett's immortal "CHOOSE LIFE" tees — an ode to Buddhism, not anti-choice activism — co-starred in a Wham! music video. In 2024, every headlining Coachella pop star with even a whiff of cultural clout flexed their own slogan T-shirt.
They came at it from different angles to be sure: Sabrina Carpenter's "Jesus Was a Carpenter" T-shirt references a half-serious quip she's previously tossed out to interviewers whereas the "Reneé-Chella Made Me Gay" T-shirts mean, obviously, that Reneé Rapp's Coachella set turned the wearer gay. She is really hot, you know.
But the purpose was identical.
Slogan shirts say the quiet part loud and the loud part louder. They are ten times more personal than an Instagram Story and a million times more meaningful than a tweet.
Slogan shirts signify a generation finding its metaphorical voice. So, even four decades removed from "FRANKIE SAY RELAX," they're still best wielded by pop stars whose literal voices are indicative of the time in which they thrive.
Let's take it back to the '80s for a second.
Things are bleak. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan's respective reigns of terror are spurring disasters like Right to Buy and America's AIDS crisis. There is no digital soapbox.
British designer Katherine Hamnett is fed up. She can only scream about the proliferation of nuclear missiles for so long and for so loudly, so she creates T-shirts that speak for her (and eventually wears one to meet Thatcher).
Hamnett's protest T-shirts are uniformly direct but emotionally disparate, ranging from "PROTEST AND SURVIVE" to "LOVE." They're a sort of prehistoric meme, capable of quick-spreading snappy messages practically tailormade for music videos.
Today's slogan T-shirts are distant relatives but they blossom from the same family tree.
Sure, contemporary slogan T-shirts are still sometimes political because sometimes we're political but they're also everything.
They're in-jokes. They're deep cuts. They're braggadocio. They're meant to be snipped from a livestream and retweeted amidst a cloud of emojis.
And no one does them better than pop stars.
Like when Kesha wore an "I AM MOTHER" T-shirt, as though the finally-free 37-year-old needed to remind us (actually, incredibly, some of the kids who saw Kesha and Reneé Rapp duet on April 14 actually were born after "Tik Tok" debuted in 2010 so...).
But what's the point of wearing a specific, wordy graphic T-shirt when we're capable of shooting any random thought out over social media in the span of a couple seconds?
That's exactly the point, actually.
Nowadays, yap is cheap and painfully prevalent. Hell, so is pop music. One can only cut through the noise with a message of remarkable clarity.
Slogan T-shirts are akin to sending a postcard in the age of email — thoughtful, purposeful, a rare show of hands-on effort when everything is so easily at one's fingertips.
They're also a no-brainer cheat code for photos of the iconic sort.
No one remembers every single photo of Paris Hilton partying in the aughts. But everyone remembers when Paris Hilton wore a "STOP BEING POOR" T-shirt (or at least they think they do).
Our culture is now even more cluttered, more chaotic than it was in Paris' 2005 heyday and especially than it was back in the '80s.
At least back then you could choose to tune in to wider culture on radio or TV alone — now, everything's a screen, everyone's got a megaphone, and facts are frustratingly fluid.
Yet big, bold T-shirts still cut through it all, perhaps because there's a tangible, analog power to the slogan T-shirt.
To wear a slogan T-shirt is to say something unequivocally.
It's no-frills, no-edit-button message conveyance.
The slogan T-shirt is a wearable status update. What's on your mind? Happy? Sad? Pissed? Political? Put it on a T-shirt and get on stage.
Olivia Rodrigo, a slogan T-shirt master, is terrifically aware of the slogan T-shirt's innate potency.
On every stop of her sold-out Guts World Tour, she slips on a fresh one-liner: "JUST A GIRL," "CARRIE BRADSHAW AF," "SAY YES TO HEAVEN." Each is memetic and each presents a puzzle for Rodrigo's fans to piece together.
And when she cameo'd at No Doubt's Coachella set, Rodrigo wore a crystalline "I ♥ ND" tanktop in double homage to Gwen Stefani, both in face value sloganeering and in reference to a classic Stefani look.
Pop stars comprehend the vitality of these things better than anyone else. They're a costume of sorts, but they're also just clothes.
That's why Ariana Grande stepped out in a printed "yes, and?" sweater in early 2024 to tease her seventh album, which she presumably wore to the studio that very day, and why statement T-shirt genius Charli XCX semi-seriously created one to announce that she "linked with addison [rae] on melrose."
2024 is so much the year of the slogan shirt that LOEWE creative director and Challengers costume designer JW Anderson resurrected a John F. Kennedy classic for the film, something ambiguously crisp and in all-caps to really turn heads.
Sure, it's been 12 months since Hailey Bieber acknowledged the whole nepo baby thing with her own DIY baby tee but only the past few months have pop stars reclaimed the slogan shirt as the wearable billboard it is.
Because, as Katherine Hamnett purportedly said, "If you want to get the message out there, you should print it in giant letters on a T-shirt."
