Fit to a T

The T-shirt is back. Then again, it never really went anywhere after making the big move in the '50s from underwear to outerwear. Now we're in the midst of a T-shirt renaissance, its biggest moment since the '70s era of KEEP ON TRUCKIN' and I'M WITH STUPID. The T-shirt has worked its way onto the red carpet, figuratively and literally: High-end designers sell tees with triple-digit price tags, and T-shirt slogans wax and wane like pop music singles. The fetishism of vintage shirts has driven fashion into the weird paradoxical undertaking of producing new garments that ape worn-out ones.

But beyond the glitz of Hollywood-endorsed brands like Smashing Grandpa is a wave of designers who treat this quintessentially American symbol as a true artistic medium—and some of the best live in Chicago.

This artists' movement is an alternative to the mainstream: These are people who treat a pop-culture artifact the same way punk rock treated the three-minute, three-chord pop song: as a way to wrap art and rebellion in a format that would be familiar to anyone who's been awake during the past couple of decades.

When Noah Singer talks about his T-shirt line [Im]Perfect Articles, he sounds more like the owner of a start-up art gallery than anything else. That's not exactly surprising: He's an artist with a literature degree, and Mike Andrews, his business partner, holds a master's in sculpture.

"The idea [behind the company] was to solicit fine artists—painters, sculptors, installation artists, filmmakers, etc.—to design tees," Singer says of the Ukrainian Village-based company. "In that sense, we are curating a line that reflects our tastes and what we are attracted to both as consumers and artists." Consumers, listen up: Thirty bucks will get you a limited-edition [Im]Perfect Articles shirt with a fine-art design exclusive to the line.

Brad Girard of the newly launched Brighton Park Press makes the philosophy explicit: "Buying an artist-designed shirt allows you to own a piece of art without spending hundreds or thousands of dollars." Going deeper into the wardrobe-basic-as-art philosophy, he adds, "With the prominence of branded articles of clothing, the designed T-shirt is an alternative that allows the wearer to participate in a cultural/visual dialogue without advertising for a corporation." South Loop-based Brighton Park offers consumers the option of wearing exclusive designs to advertise for charity. Two of the dozen shirts in its debut line are inspired by the Chicago Abused Women Coalition and the American Diabetes Association, and the profits from those shirts benefit the two groups. "One of the shirts in our first line reads SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL and leaves a blank field for the buyer to fill in with whatever message they'd like," says business partner David Wojtonik. "This is parallel to our own approach of finding things that we think are worth bringing to people's attention and doing our part to make those messages and ideas available to the public."

More often, though, young boutique T-shirt lines inspire others to make, well, more boutique T-shirt lines. For every earnest populist-art evangelist, there are dozens more just trying to come up with their own FREE KATIE idea and the payday that comes with their 15 seconds of fleeting pop-fad fame. "Despite the initial costs of getting batches of tees printed—screen-printing fees, finding affordable blanks—producing shirts has a fairly low barrier to entry," says Jason Cosper, who runs a popular Anaheim, California-based T-shirt blog called Preshrunk (www.preshrunk.info). "How many other businesses can be started and run completely in your spare time with a few weeks' or months' saved pay?"

If there are enough people so transfixed by tees to justify a site like Preshrunk, a collector's culture parallel to sneaker freaks could be in the works. Cosper explains: "I'm sure there are plenty of T-shirt otaku out there"—otaku being the Japanese term for, roughly, "collector geeks"—"but I can see a culture of kids who are into tees just as much as the ones who are into sneakers bubbling below the surface." And if that indeed becomes the case, there should be no shortage of artists eager to create for their consumption.

Pickin' cotton

Head to the Web for your torso-covering needs

[Im]Perfect Articles and Brighton Park Press are online (www.imperfectarticles.com and www.brightonparkpress.com, respectively) and at Penelope's (1913 W Division St between Wolcott and Winchester Aves, 773-395-2351), the It spot for T-shirt freaks and freakettes.

New Chicago imprint Secret Handshake (www.secrethandshakedesigns.com) unites a stable of artists and designers under one freaky banner. These T-shirts make killer gifts for Tim Burton fans and your friends who still own bongs.

Threadless (www.threadless.com) is a free-for-all graphic-design battle royal where the winners get printed up for consumption. The shirts are consistently interesting—and occasionally brilliant.

For the ladies, Chicago's I See France (www.iseefrance.net) drops graphic science on underthings that are so fresh, it's a shame to keep them under anything.

Tees from Dr. Hotdog (www.drhotdog.com) capture the hipster lowbrow-art aesthetic. Very Vice magazine.

Turntable Lab (www.turntablelab.com) is best known as a top DJ-culture website. Browse its clothing section for cutting-edge designers and mash-up tees, including the classic Notorious B.I.G./Che Guevara jam.—Miles Raymer