House of Holland

House of Holland is the marketing byproduct of London designer Henry Holland, who apparently seduced Western Civilisation As We Know It by releasing his “Fashion Groupie Collection” — a line of fluorescent, mini-length t-shirts for irony whores (or actual whores, this is unclear but irrelevant), which seemed to directly inject the eternal “slogan t-shirt” with the necessary crack to totally and globally revive it.

At the time of writing this article, Holland’s effect is clear and pervasive. Supré, General Pants and others franchises I really give a shit about are stocking slogan t-shirts in overwhelming numbers and varieties — all rather explicit and overwhelmingly weak facsimiles of Holland’s original long, loose shirt, cut just a fraction proud of the buttocks (or sometimes just shy of them, oooh), with crude colour choices and unnecessarily massive print. Yes. The winning look. So much so that literally ANY expression — from whore invitational to vague philosophy — is now being adopted as a worthy slogan apparently capable of shifting infinite buttloads of units.

The obvious question is why. Why does the slogan shirt exist at all? The genesis, by all accounts, was “CHOOSE LIFE” in 1983 and its creator was designer Katharine Hamnett. The LIFE shirt, which would later be appropriated by unhinged, American anti-abortion dogmatists, was originally one in Hamnett’s series of sincerely leftist platitudes — others including “SAVE THE WHALES”, “EDUCATION NOT MISSILES” and “WORLDWIDE NUCLEAR BAN NOW”, and so on and so forth in this somewhat wet, but clearly genuine fashion.

However, this only serves to explain the slogan shirt’s chronology. It does nothing to actually account for its continuing and current omnipotence, nor the reason why Holland can now presumably sleep on a giant bed of money, intertwined with the supple flesh of unlimited irony whores (although, by the by, Hamnett actually re-launched her various LIFE and WHALE shirts last year, though the events are probably unrelated).

So really the more pressing or at least more interesting question is, Why would anyone want to wear a shirt that says “UHU GARETH PUGH” (by Holland) any more than they should want to wear a shirt that says “I’M WITH STUPID” or a hat that says “FUCK EVERYBODY” or have a car sticker that reads “BITCH ON BOARD”? Presumably someone has said, “Not only does this amuse me, it represents me in such a way that others must be made aware of. Everyone must know that I am with stupid, all the time.”

This is not to say that ALL personal shirt slogans are inane, by any stretch, this would be absurd, but Holland’s obviously are, but even so are unfathomably popular, which seems pretty curious given that slogan shirts are the most explicit, outward expression of identity, second only to a tattoo on the face. This doesn’t actually answer anything, but it is an important reminder that, even if by the time you read this Henry Holland is washed-up, junk-addicted or dead, he was probably important.

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