When I was younger, my usual clothing choice tended to be black jeans, and a black T-shirt with something on it. I had a big collection of black T-shirts containing a variety of stuff I'd found amusing or pretty or inspirational at the time: things containing references to fiction I liked, things that were just aesthetically pleasing, things that were funny, you name it. I even dabbled once or twice in designing T-shirts myself to add to the collection.
A few years back I decided that in some unspecified sense those T-shirts were not really me any more, and bought a whole set of plain black ones that I've been wearing ever since. My collection of T-shirts with stuff on them is still sitting in my wardrobe, but hasn't been touched for years.
When I send email or post to Usenet, I put a signature file at the bottom of which I also have a largish collection, mostly containing quotations or comments that are at least vaguely humorous in intent. One gets randomly selected to go on the bottom of any given email. Now I'm starting to feel that that, like the T-shirts, is ‘not me’ any more, and that it reflects the taste of my five- or ten-years-ago self rather than that of my current self, and I increasingly find myself contemplating ditching the lot of them or at least narrowing down to one standard one.
I'm not quite sure what my essential objection is to these collections, but it feels as if it's the same one in both cases.
It could be that it's the random selection. Every so often my software picks a sig quote for a given email that's specifically inappropriate in some way for that particular context, or even if not specifically inappropriate it sometimes just carries the wrong tone (e.g. too jokey for a serious email regardless of specific subject matter); if I notice that, I force the generator to re-roll, but probably I don't always notice. And likewise, not quite as often, with the T-shirts: there was always the chance that on a given day I'd happen to be wearing a T-shirt that had some unfortunate relevance to something I was going to be doing (e.g. there are some moments when it's tactless to wear a T-shirt with Neil Gaiman's Death on the front). So vetting my sig generator's output is an extra chore added to the process of sending any email, and perhaps I'm just getting bored with having to do that.
Alternatively, it could be that the phrase I've been using above – ‘it's not me’ – is pretty close to the answer in itself. Any given T-shirt or sig quote doesn't say very much about me, but the whole lot taken together gives a broader picture of what sorts of things I like or find amusing. And that picture is of somebody I used to be, not of me as I am now; so perhaps the point is not that I want not to blazon slogans and pictures across myself at all, but that I just don't want to blazon that collection across myself and haven't the energy to start a new collection from scratch.
On the third hand, I don't feel any desire to go out and start a new collection of decorated T-shirts or sig quotes, so perhaps that's not my essential objection and I've just become a person less inclined to broadcast information about my tastes in art and wit; not that I haven't still got tastes (and at least some of them haven't changed), just that I'm more inclined to feel that they're a thing to be talked about among friends rather than shouted to the world at large by my torso.
A related possibility is that I might have subconsciously begun to succumb to the annoying notion of ‘looking professional’ which for some reason says that professional people aren't supposed to have visible personalities at all. I rather hope not – that's a concept that has always irritated me – but it can't be denied that I feel particularly uncomfortable at the idea of wearing a silly T-shirt to come into work in particular, and I don't use my collection of sig quotes in my work email either.
What do other people think about this stuff? Anyone else reading this have strong opinions for or against wearing clothes that say things about you other than (unavoidably) your taste in clothes specifically? At work as opposed to at home? Does anyone else think it's sensible to draw a parallel with a collection of sig quotes, or is that just me?
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I think not feeling the need to shout about one's personality or tastes is sometimes part of "growing up". For me it was also to do with being a bit more interested in clothes and being happy to choose my wardrobe based on colour and style, rather than picking a T-shirt as a default (which is what I did before). I can't imagine that's true for you.
I have designed my own shirts before, for myself and friends. I have an idea right now, but I'm not sure if it will happen.
Perhaps, although I think (if I can remember my younger self correctly) that I would not have seen it in terms of 'feeling the need to shout' at the time. (In fact I was generally suspicious of any sentence fragment including the phrase 'feel the need', since it seemed to me that it was most often used as a means of pre-emptively framing a debate in a way that made it hard to argue in favour of what might in fact be a perfectly sensible thing to want to do.)
I don't think I ever thought in terms of wanting to tell the world what sort of person I was. I wore things I thought were funny or cool because I enjoyed seeing the same sorts of thing on other people – I'd laugh at the jokes on other people's T-shirts, or admire the artwork – and so it seemed natural to give back in the same way, to wear things that would make other people smile or laugh. The point wasn't, at least consciously, to identify me as "someone who likes that set of things"; it was to inspire pleasure in other people who liked the same things as I did.
Which suggests that maybe what's put me off the practice now is precisely the fact that I've started to care more about the fact that by wearing decorated T-shirts I (whether I was particularly trying to or not) communicate a profile of my personality and tastes to people who may not share them. In other words, I care more about how I'm perceived by people in general, rather than just wearing things for the pleasure of people like me and not worrying about what anyone else might think.
But then ... I still admire the artwork, and laugh at the jokes, on other people's T-shirts, and now I'm not giving back any more – I'm a freeloader in the funny-T-shirt economy. And I'm still communicating something about myself by eschewing those T-shirts, in that I communicate that I'm the kind of person who wears a totally boring black outfit every day and doesn't seem to mind that very much. So I'm not sure I actually won there, even though my subconscious feels more comfortable this way!
Ohhh - maybe it's because you don't go to the Calling and other such loud events anymore, so that you can go up to a friend and say something random and funny and they don't say "what? I didn't catch that, can you speak up?" so often - like literally not needing subtitles anymore?
It hadn't occurred to me to think of funny T-shirts as subtitles for my spoken wit :-) (Though, if so, they'd have to be subtitles of the sort that give up on a totally untranslatable pun and try to retain the spirit of the line by writing a completely different pun in the target language...)