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05/05/2001 Archived Entry: "Alternative Clothing"

What with the T-shirts [small | blown up] I'm getting printed for the clever marketing campaign that Spielberg is doing for his AI movie, I've just realised that it provides a solution to the age-old problem of where to get alternative clothing. Readers of Douglas Coupland's wonderfully funny Microserfs novel will remember a long thread in the book where they talk about how all the clothing they wear is made by Gap, or Dockers, or Levis, or CK and so on. The problem is, though, that if you actually want to get decent affordable clothing, there isn't much other choice than to go with these homogenised, 'soulless capitalistic' brands. Unless you made your own clothes, that is, and that's not really an option.

Or is it? With the rise of places such as Cafepress in America and doubtless soon to be similar services in the UK, it's incredibly easy to make customised clothing, as you as you have some knowledge of graphics manipulation. And the thing is that it still ends up cheaper than buying an equivalent T-shirt or sweater from your local, e.g. Gap. I'm getting the AI T-shirts printed at a nearby shop in Cambridge for a fairly reasonable price (£9 each), and I'm perfectly convinced that they're more original and cheaper than a lot of other stuff.

Maybe it's just me, but when I see around a dozen people every day wearing the same damned 'GAP' hooded sweaters around the university, I just despair. Then I handily pretend to myself that I'm not wearing a Gap coat (well, at least I'm not doing their advertising for them!)

Random thought - my Evolution and Behaviour lecturer, Professor McKintosh, at times can have an uncanny resemblance to Gary Cole, star in American Gothic. Eerie.