Monday, May 03, 2010

The First Ever Piece of "Confessions" Merchandise

I think I've finally discovered my calling in life. I'm going to design, distribute and sell my own t-shirts. I can't believe I've never thought of it before. It's perfect. I wear t-shirts. And I've seen other people wearing t-shirts. And sometimes I'll see someone wearing a t-shirt and I'll say "Hey. That's a nice t-shirt" and they'll say "thank you" and I'll say "no problem". And you know what? It really is no problem. I can just look at a t-shirt and decide whether or not it's nice. I don't even have to think about it for that long. It's like I just know. Like some kind of sixth sense. And so I thought about this and I thought: "wouldn't it be great if I combined my love of t-shirts with my ability to distinguish nice t-shirts from not nice t-shirts and designed my own t-shirts?" And then I thought about this for a while and then answered myself: "yes. Yes it would".

So I've designed my own t-shirt. I wanted a slogan. Something witty and punchy, packed with hidden depth and meaning. Something that you could read once and find hilarious and then keep reading again and again and every time you get something new out of it and then you speak to someone else about it and you say "hey, did you see the new t-shirt?" and they'll say "yeah what did you think?" and you'll say "I loved it. I think it means this:..." and they'll say "oh really? I thought it meant this:..." and you'll be all like, "oh my goodness, I never thought of it like that but you're so right".

And so, bearing all that in mind, I came up with this:


Pretty darn brilliant right? You see, the guy who's wearing it is asking a girl (whichever girl might be reading it at the time) to go out with him. And then, to sweeten the deal, he conjures up a cozy image in which they're going out and she's borrowing his clothes. And the girl will think "You know what? It'd be great to be in a relationship in which I can borrow and wear someone else's clothes. Yeah. Let's do it."

However, upon the completion of said idea, I realised that I hadn't thought it through properly. What happens when the girl goes out with the guy and is then wearing the very t-shirt in question?

This issue would have to be addressed

...

On the t-shirt:


But this is just an observation. I didn't want the girl to think that this was acceptable behaviour:


But now all I'm doing is highlighting the problem and no girl is going to want to go out with any guy who is complaining about the relationship before it's even started. The t-shirt would have to provide a solution. This, I figured, could be addressed on the back:


Ok. But then I started worrying that a lot of guys might not want to buy a t-shirt which effectively states that the wearer will be boyfriend to whoever reads it. What if an ugly girl reads it? What if another guy reads it? What if a bar full of ugly dudes squint in the wearer's direction and drunkenly absorb the text? What will the wearer do then? He can't take it back. It's on a t-shirt. I took care of this with a cleverly worded disclaimer:


So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. A pretty much perfect t-shirt which can be worn by virtually any man on the planet:


Except it's not. Not yet. You see I realised that, in striving to design a t-shirt which catered for heterosexual men looking for love, I had overlooked an important demographic. A whole culture of men who would be desperate to buy my t-shirt but who would feel excluded by its message. But that's ok. I've taken care of that as well. The t-shirt is reversible. For all my fans in the homosexual community, simply turn the t-shirt inside out and voila:


This is going to be the best t-shirt ever.