Self Portrait with Print Shirt, 2008

I love this shirt. It's so damned odd & by far the most amusing article of clothing I own; nothing else comes close. At one point I considered bleaching it just a little to tone the colors down but I couldn't bring myself to take any of the fun out of it. This is also the most pretentious shirt in my closet. Why? Let me tell you. This is a Ralph Lauren shirt that retailed at well over $100. So here is this expensive shirt: it is a nice but completely unremarkable cotton fabric, it is your basic short sleeve summer shirt with no fancy tailoring but what really pushes it deep into the realm of the pretentious is the print. The pattern is a recreation of a cheap Indian print bedspread, complete with slightly off register patterns. The kind my hippie friends purchased at Azuma in the late 60s to hang on the walls of our dorm rooms & stare at while we were high, along with some Fillmore posters. OK, so I had an antique paisley shawl from Kashmir & reproductions of Gustave Klimt in my room, but that's not the point. No, the point is that this shirt is luxury sportswear designed to look inexpensive; it is meant to conjure up the allure of the late 60s, globe-trekking, hashish smuggling, I-just-picked-this-up-in-in-a-shop-in-Bombay/Fez/Bangkok bohemian & while it was manufactured in the Philippines (there is a tag sewn at the collar that tells me this) & there is a vague chance the fabric may have been printed somewhere in South Asia; the design was surely executed on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, ca. 2003. The topper? Ralph Lauren's birth name is Ralph Lifshitz. 

And yet, in spite of all this deception & pretense, I still love this shirt. 

See… This is why I find fashion so amusing.

By the way, I paid $25.99 for it. On the clearance rack at an overstock store.