In my art practice, I commonly work with a number of recycled items: worn clothes, scraps of fabric, paper, etc. I find that the use of these types of “throwaway” items also allows me a lot of creative freedom. When I don’t have to worry about wasting the “good stuff” I find that I’m a lot more willing to take creative chances, really allowing myself to go in and experiment, whether through new techniques or in the creation of silhouettes that I’ve not worked with before.

My goal in working with this t-shirt was one that I often have when upcycling items: to keep the used materials front and center while making the fact that they are being upcyled completely recede. I want people to see this as a new, fully realized article, with little or no thought to what it used to be. Generally, I feel my most successful projects are the ones where people don’t know that it has been upcycled at all.

In the case of this shirt I wanted to keep it as a top, but to combine it with a contrast material to move away from the feeling of it being just a plain cotton t-shirt. Ultimately, I chose a chunky, cream-colored yarn.

To start, I rolled and stitched the sleeves into very short cap sleeves, and then I cropped several inches from the length.
The design I decided on was a simple diamond pattern that was to be embroidered into the shirt with the yarn, so I used a ruler and fabric pen to mark out a grid across the shirt surface of where I would be doing the sewing. After that, it was ready to be embroidered.

The final touch was adding a wrap-around stitch to the cap sleeves and around the collar.

I left the cut bottom of the shirt as is, since I really enjoyed the ruching effect it was given by the tension of the embroidered stitches.

Unfortunately, I was not able to be part of the workshop with artist Shelby Head last week. I was disappointed because I am always looking for ways to recycle clothes or accessories I no longer us and try hard to avoid the guilt of simply throwing them away. Nevertheless, for this post, I had the chance to think in depth about the role of the t-shirt, a garment which is usually underestimated for its simplicity and – in some cases – even considered banal and boring. While looking at the Fabric of Cultures website, an item in particular surprisingly caught my attention: a white, plain but classy t-shirt. This fact made me think about the role of t-shirts in my personal experience but also in modern society.

The T-shirt in general is considered a comfortable and practical piece of clothing for everyday life, usually perceived as too basic to be worn in a professional environment or an elegant occasion. But yet it is used in varied circumstances, showing adaptability among its hidden properties. It is often underestimated because it is cheap and easy to wear: it is ready-to-go, it does not need much embellishment and it fits different body types. It is a symbol of fashion equality, as everybody can afford and wear a t-shirt (i.e. let’s think of the t-shirt business in impoverished nations).

When I think about the t-shirt, I associated it with the idea of western culture and modernity: born at the beginning of the XX Century, this piece of clothing became a universal symbol of democratization that can be declined in many different ways, without losing its simplicity or becoming irreverent. It is linked to youth and spontaneity but it is also worn by people of different ages, cultures and social statuses.

If we follow Eco’s thinking, in his article Lumbar thought, that clothes are make us assuming a specific demeanor (Eco 316), we can conclude that t-shirts affect human beings the least: as they are comfortable and easy to wear, they do not lead us to think about what we are wearing and how we are perceived by society in that moment. However, if we are, we are associated with the idea of conformity and neutrality. If we think about someone who does not want to be noticed, we can picture them wearing a plain t-shirt.

Nonetheless I pushed myself to redefine my idea of t-shirts and in particular the white one. This is probably the article of clothing in my wardrobe that I consider least and yet it is the most important and has never been missing. Since I was a teenager and I started to make fashion choices for myself, I can remember having a white t-shirt. Whenever I am shopping for something to wear, I tend to go straight to the pile of the white t-shirts. It almost seems my subconscious pushes me to the piece that I know I will always wear whenever I feel challenged in my outfit decisions. A white basic shirt has all the potential I need: it is almost like an empty space I can fill with my imagination (i.e. jewelry, jacket, pants, shoes); I can play with it, reshape and redesign the surroundings of my own person, and once I am done, I can always go back and start from the beginning.

I like the idea of thinking that, instead of having only one piece in my wardrobe to rethink, I could use my white t-shirt to create something new every time. A white t-shirt that I can erase and modify and finally bring back to its original self.

This is the first segment of the video 

Second 

When we were told we had to take one article of clothing and turn it into something else, I was really stumped as to what we would do. Once we got started, my mind started working. You could honestly see the gears turning. I suggested we turn the shirt into a pair of shorts. The rest of the group agreed and the rest is history. We folded up the bottom of the shirt to make the pants shorter. We used hot glue to keep it in place. Krzysztof had the brilliant idea to put the sleeves in and convert them into pockets. That really made the shirt look like a true pair of shorts. We decided as a group to add some rips in the shorts to give it a Yeezy vibe. Along with some minor alterations to the shorts to make them fit better, the shorts were practically finished.