T-world: Eddie Zammit and the New York issue

There are magazines about trainers, magazines about skateboards and more streetwear blogs than anyone can read, but at the start of 2012 there was only one printed journal devoted entirely to the T-shirt. T-world was made in Melbourne by Eddie Zammit, a graphic designer with a collection of more than 3,500 shirts. Its seventh edition had just come out and was devoted to New York, taking in figures from Milton Glaser, the designer of the I Love NY logo, to labels such as Milkcrate Athletics and Supreme.

Zammit had also just finished curating NEXT in Sydney, which he described as the largest T-shirt exhibition in the southern hemisphere: over a thousand shirts from around the world, promoted by an online campaign that drew more than 85,000 visits. The UK street-art quarterly Very Nearly Almost caught up with him shortly afterwards.

A journal that became a reference book

Zammit explained that he had always made T-world outside working hours. About a year earlier he left the design agency where he worked, and that gave him the chance to do something he had wanted to try for a long time, which was to build an entire issue around one city. Once he was in New York he decided to treat the project much more seriously.

The format changed with it. The New York issue has hard covers, because readers told him they kept earlier ones as reference books, and that is now how he thinks of it: somewhere to find out things you did not know. He admitted that this issue was fairly self-indulgent, a picture of whatever surrounded him at the time, and said the thing he liked most about it was the age range. The people featured run from 18 to 81, which to him is the point of T-shirts. Nobody is too old or too young to wear one.

The size of the collection surprised even him. He had no idea how many shirts he owned until an argument with a former girlfriend over wardrobe space made him count.

Parody, raves and FUCT

Asked where the interest came from, Zammit pointed out how young the whole field is. Most of the labels and artists known for T-shirts today only appeared from the 1990s on. Freshjive dates from 1989 and Stüssy from 1980, and there is not much older than that. He thinks the form is at its peak now, and for him it is a natural fit with a training in graphic design, since typography, illustration and photography all end up printed on cotton.

The trigger was parody. FUCT, the Los Angeles label, remains one of his favourites, and he loved its flip of the Ford logo, along with Rick Klotz’s early Freshjive work, which turned the Tide and Big Gulp logos into jokes. Those shirts belonged to his raving years in the early 1990s. From there he moved into design and magazines, and T-world grew out of both.

Where the money comes from

Zammit wants to take NEXT to the cities with the biggest audiences for it, naming Los Angeles, London and New York. The limit, he said, is money. Mounting it is expensive, but he thinks it is worth the cost because seeing so many shirts in one place makes people realise how much design goes into them and how valuable they have become.

He was open about how T-world is paid for. It began on his own savings, and to some extent still runs on them to keep cash flowing, with advertising and sponsorship covering the rest. Nobody, he said, makes a magazine because it looks cool; the point is to give a voice to something you care about. His father’s death, he said, had made clear to him why the work mattered.

NEXT was funded differently. It received a grant from the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust, and because the show worked like a very large magazine laid out in a room, different sections attracted their own advertising money. His worry with any of this is keeping the integrity of what he is trying to say, and he expects that pressure never to go away.

Sesame Street and the letter T

Running T-world since 2005, and talking the idea up for longer than that, has made it much easier to deal with brands. The issue before New York was a kids’ issue. Designers who were also parents kept telling him children’s T-shirts were poor and that nothing much existed beyond chain-store ranges, so he set out to change that and ended up on the set of Sesame Street.

Out of it came a collaboration series, Brought to You by the Letter T, pairing individual Muppets with designers who were parents. Jake Nickell, founder of Threadless, got Grover in his guise as Global Grover, on the reasoning that the biggest T-shirt site on the web belonged with the globetrotting monster. Luca Ionescu, the Sydney typographer Zammit rates among the best anywhere, was paired with the Count because of his Romanian roots. The designers were also allowed to interview their characters, and the hardest part, Zammit said, was finding something to ask that the internet could not already answer.

The brands he rates

His favourites were specific. FUCT again, with Erik Brunetti credited as someone who cannot put a foot wrong; Sixpack for its designers and its garments; Addict for the artists it brings in. He admired how far Klotz pushed the idea of a brand at Freshjive, to the point of replacing the name with a plain black rectangle. Morning Breath in Brooklyn got a mention for design, and Milkcrate, whose founder Aaron LaCrate has collaborated widely, for the shirts Zammit wore constantly in the late 1990s.

Tracking down Milton Glaser for the New York issue was, he said, entirely worth the effort, and he called Glaser probably the finest graphic designer there has been. What struck him in the studio was that Glaser had no computer on his desk, which to Zammit proved that the concept still counts for more than the execution. He made the same point about Jeremyville, the Australian artist based in New York, who always has a sketchbook in his back pocket and posts a new drawing online every day. In the long run, he thinks, it is the idea that people remember.

Supreme interested him for its habit of collaborating with celebrities past their peak, which draws plenty of criticism. He thinks it is one of very few labels that can still honestly call itself a skate brand. Growing out of a homegrown scene is fine, in his view, as long as a label stays loyal to it, and he gave Mishka as an example: it has never drifted from its taste for odd toys and strange things any child of the 1980s would know.

Why shops still matter

Zammit worries that a generation raised on online shopping will miss what a good shop does. He is not against buying online, but going into a brand’s own store tells you something about its personality that a website cannot. In New York the store he rates above all others is ALIFE, which in its early days felt fresh and unlike anywhere else.

T-world has a section given over to small details for the same reason. He described himself as a geek about neck labels, shopping bags and stickers, and said he picks up stickers wherever he travels. Walking around New York in the middle of the night he still found stickers by the Melbourne artists Meggs and Reka, which pleased him.

Rebuilding the journal

For the New York edition he started more or less from scratch. He stepped back from the design studio he ran, worked out what he did and did not like about T-world, and simplified the design. Content still comes first, but it took him seven issues to realise that T-shirt artists and T-shirt designers are different people. Kid Zoom, for instance, is an artist who has made T-shirt designs, not a designer. The journal is now organised into ten sections, among them brands, designers and souvenirs.

One of his favourite finds was a company called Cookies-n-Cream. Having learned that a shop in SoHo cost about 50,000 dollars a month to run, its two founders fitted out a truck for less than 15,000 and sold shirts from it in the middle of SoHo. He liked it as business sense and as a gesture at the big names paying rent.

Cities, fairs and criticism

Melbourne is his favourite city, partly because it is home, but also because of its size and its down-to-earth, funny people. The weather counts against it, which is why Los Angeles, where a T-shirt works all year round, ranks so high with T-shirt people. He loves Tokyo for its sense of style, and respects London for the standard of its graphic design. He is also a fan of the Bread & Butter trade fair in Berlin, where brands’ stands can outdo their own shops.

Living in Australia means constant travel to keep up, though he tries to stay out of the scene’s politics, and someone in Los Angeles once told him that making the journal half a world away was an advantage.

Talk turned to The Hundreds, whose co-founder Bobby Hundreds has drawn a lot of criticism, both for a list of the fifty greatest streetwear brands he wrote for Complex and for a shirt carrying an aerial photograph of New York taken on 10 September 2001. Zammit, who has spent time with him, called him a good person. He related how Hundreds had answered him on the shirt: the image was by the New York photographer Craig Wetherby, of the Frank151 circle, who had been asked for a picture that meant New York to him, and New Yorkers themselves wore it with pride. Zammit admired how measured the reply was, and added that The Hundreds, like many labels people assume are backed by investors, was built up one shirt at a time. He said that is how he works too.