Let It Speak For Itself
In the last few months I broke a longstanding personal resolution of mine: no shirts with things on them, particularly statements and slogans.
Hold on a sec. The web needs another treatise against ironic t-shirts like I need a hole in my nice new blank American Apparel tees. This isn’t that. Rather, it’s a thought on design, architecture, fashion, and public spaces.
I love graffiti, and particularly textual graffiti, the wilder the style the better. I watch links tagged as graffiti on del.icio.us and this evening I saw Wonderful Graffiti on the feed. Wonderful Graffiti is printed vinyl lettering for walls and surfaces, either of prefab prose or custom contemplations. Their example uses include a bookshelf, "a “wine niche”":http://wonderfulgraffiti.com/photo_album.php?pid=69, and more.
Like this: a foyer labeled with the phrase: “From wherever you are, enter and be welcome.” This is a terrible thing. It takes a space – a space which should not need to be labeled as welcoming – and strips it of any intrinsic value. It is the architectural/interior design equivalent of eschewing fashion that communicates through form, line, pattern, and texture for crude text on a homely shirt.
This Graffiti is not Wonderful. But does the graffiti I enjoy so much taint spaces in the same way? I would argue that, well-applied, it does not. Most graffiti is found in lower income areas riddled with aging and inadequate structures and spaces. Graffiti like the beautiful series of community-supported murals I saw in an alleyway in the Mission today takes these otherwise depressing spaces and tries to make the best of them, giving voice to those without the resources to speak through property. You may see caustic graffiti on tacky buildings and temporary structures, but rarely is truly beautiful and expressive architecture defaced.
What does this have to do with eschewing anything but blank shirts? The parallels between fashion and architecture need not be reiterated here but suffice to say that both disciplines concern themselves with objects of constant aesthetic and cultural use. If you live in a city and are out and about it seems reasonable to suggest that as many people will see what you’re wearing as will see a building on a well-trafficed street on a given day. How that building looks and what’s on it will be noticed, just as people will notice what’s on your shirt.
The point, then, is to let things speak for themselves. As much as I love graffiti, I think I can safely say that if communities and buildings were planned with humane aesthetics in mind, graffiti would not be missed. And although wearing a statement across one’s chest can, at times, be a powerful cultural tool, a more effective statement can be made through creative and subtle dress.
The things we see every day can communicate more without saying anything; that is the beauty of objects.