The Semiotics of T-Shirts P.K. Manning Betsy Cullum-Swan Departments of Sociology Department of Sociology and Psychiatry School of Criminal Justice Michigan State University East Lansing, Michigan USA 48824 INTRODUCTION Semiotics is the study of how signs convey meaning in everyday life, but not all signwork is immediate, visible, or even a noticeable aspect of social life. It would appear that making visible the semiotic work of everyday objects requires an articulation of ethnography, or close cultural description, with the tools of semiotics. Ethnographic work will result in the explication of the underlying codes and principles that order surface phenomena. It should serve to clarify the polysemic nature of communication. Semiotics, the science of signs, since it deals with differences in context that produce meaning, rather than the reality of "the world out there," provides a rich vocabulary of terms and techniques for analysis of the codes and signs that constitute the reality of social relations. The principles that underlie how signs mean within a system of relationships, have to be extracted from the features of everyday life. The semiotic model, relying on the comparison of differences within a context, can be employed to isolate changes in the functions of signs, sign vehicles, paradigms and codes and to analyze meanings. Stability and continuity combined with requisite variety are fundamental features of communication. Signs are incomplete (Peirce, 1931); fundamentally context-dependent and possess imminently multiple meanings. Context, or what is brought to the communicational situation, inumbrates the sign, and is shaped by equivocality and ambiguity in messages. Constitutive conventions firmly link the expression and related content to produce a sign. To accomplish stabilized communication, people depend heavily on institutional contexts and interpretative processes (Goffman, l959, Culler, l977). But such stability is not simply as matter of interpersonal communication and experience. Personal communication and interaction are increasingly shaped by mass media-produced imagery. Increasingly, mass-produced images and once-processed impressions replace personal experience with events, and floating signifiers (those without clear images are widely reproduced and reified, especially by the mass media, they become commodities, and an unquestioned social reality. The media become the locus of the illusion of reality (Denzin,l986:196). The "reality" to which such imagery refers is the reality created by imagery (other images), fraught with rich connotative, ideological and (signs about signs taken to be objective or universal opinion or truth) that media produce and reproduce. The point is that other images, rather than immediate personal experience or local knowledge of events, become the source of veridicality. Objects, the topic here, are of course are no less shaped and given reality than social relations. They are caught in the mesh of intersubjective reality amplified by the media. The analysis of communications, especially that about objects, will require more than the application of semiotics. It requires a fully explicated imaginative ethnography involving principles derived from semiotics (Eco, l979). Barthes (1983:27), for example, suggests that once a system of relations is identified, one should use "the commutative test." This means that given an identified structure of relations, one alters an element and examines the social consequences. By examining alterations in elements of a structure in conjunction or separately, one can identify a general inventory of "...concomitant variations... and consequently... determine a certain number of commutative classes in the ensemble of a given structure" (Barthes, l983:19-20). These variations in relations within a system may also be patterned chronologically. Our analytic procedure requires careful description of a structure, fashion, the marketing of differences, its units, paradigms and codes. Fashion refers on the one hand to the physical and material world, and, on the other, to the symbolic world of the idea of difference and changes in dress. Semiotics provides a vocabulary : the vestimentary system (that describing clothes), the code(s) or rules that articulate instances of dress, paradigms or associational contexts that organize the meaning of units. Our topic is the garment, "t-shirt." This label originated post-World War Two, but is currently in common use. THE T-SHIRT IN THE FASHION SYSTEM Fashion is a dramatic example of the production of items for display and the display of these images for mass consumption. Fashion produces images to market and sell alterations in appearance; fashion fashion," but "low fashion," and in explanations for the rapidly changing character of a banal object, the t-shirt. The t-shirt now plays a functional role in any ensemble of clothing, as well as in the fashion system itself. The shirts worn now as underclothes or as outer garments in warm weather, sometimes called "t-shirts" (an iconic metaphoric name derived, presumably, from their shape), "vests," or "underwear," are rather banal everyday objects. From these humble utilitarian beginnings, the shirt has risen, at least metaphorically, to assume an important symbolic role. It has become one of the prime emblems or icons of modern life, encoded in changing codes and carrying sign functions. It is a sign vehicle whose functions not only express selves, but the social and political fields in which it exists. What follows, unfortunately, is not a proper social history of the t-shirt. We rely on observations gathered on the streets of several university towns, in tourist areas and souvenir shops in Chinatown in San Francisco and the French Quarter of New Orleans. It should be noted that as a socio-semiotic analysis, unique, individual meanings of a shirt are not discussed. The fact that a person is attached to a shirt because it was once his brother's, father's, or boy friend's, a gift from a loved one, or has rich associations with a past event, place or time, is important at the individual level. These features can be associated with shirts encoded in any of the following ways. We have no data on this (other than our own well-loved t-shirts). The analysis proceeds as follows. The first task for a semiotic or syntagms (11 are identified) within the vestimentary code of that system. The second task is to sort out the five associative contexts or discuss the shirt with the seven codes that organize both units and paradigms. Discussion of the codes and examples thereof constitute the bulk of the paper. A concluding section speculates on the role of temporal change in codes and the salience of key elements or units in three chronotypes or eras. CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK The eleven units Eleven syntagms (units) are interchangeable elements necessary for the production and consumption of a T-shirt. These are also relevant to the imminent transformation in the shirt's meaning. Some 11 communicative units (that convey organize how the shirt communicates meaning), it would appear, have been transformed in the last one hundred years in North America. They appear to be related to the evolution of the shirt from a home made item worn beneath visible garments, to a very complex signifying public garment. These units are : where the shirt is made ; the materials used to make the shirt ; the values expressed by the shirt, including both expressive and utilitarian values; where it is intended to be worn (setting-public vs. private wear; front vs. back stage) ; the cut of the shirt ; the nature of its adornment; the color(s) of the shirt ; what it represents or symbolizes publicly; the social roles or statuses it connotes ; its association with other garments in a fashion system ; and the nature of the reflexivity of garment. Although this is not an exhaustive list of potential units, it captures many of the key aesthetic and semantic aspects of the shirt as a sign vehicle. The paradigms The units cluster together in a non-random fashion. They can be further organized into metaphoric or paradigmatic clusters of meaning. These make explicit certain themes in the "vertical organization" of meaning. Five paradigms set out the t-shirt's changing meaning : the metaphoric clusters also contain a set of metonymic relations. They offer clues to what patterns of presence or absence of units determine the overall configuration of the object. However, certain underlying principles or codes reveal the rules governing how shirts are perceived and used. The remainder of the paper outlines the patterning of these syntagms and paradigms by codes. WHAT IS A T-SHIRT? : SEVEN CODES A code is a set of principles that organize the patterning of signs semantically and syntactically. Codes, encoding and decoding, are essential features of signwork (See Guiraud, 1975: Chs 3-5). At least seven non-exclusive codes encode the t-shirt as an object. By seeing the shirt as a function of preformed codes, one shifts attention from the shirt as an object to its perception and use. let us list the relevant codes in order : the utilitarian code, the mass-produced manufactured code, the code of leisure (the t-shirt as a visible outer garment); the code of complex and fluid expressive signs; the code for problematic icons; the code of the shirt as a walking visual pun, and the t-shirt as a copy or double. Code 1: The shirt as a utilitarian undergarment The "t-shirt" is a soft, plain, uncolored, sleeveless or short-sleeved, usually cotton, garment originally worn under another shirt, blouse, or heavier overgarment. Called now a "t-shirt," "vest," or "singlet," it was a useful and functional item of apparel unmarked with insignia, slogans, sayings, or emblems. It served the private and unseen purposes of protecting the wearer from the harsh, perhaps prickly, material of heavier outer garments such as sweaters or wool shirts, absorbing sweat, giving support to breasts, or simply conserving heat and permitting air to circulate around the body. Made to wear under heavy outer shirts, they were once called "undershirts." The degree to which these utilitarian functions were sex-differentiated of the shirt, shared a value system, exchange values, and imagery governing the exchange. Code 2 : The shirt as a manufactured item Probably in the early part of this century, these undergarments became widely available, mass-produced manufactured items. They were and are sold in mail order catalogs and in department stores such as J.C. Penney, Sears, Roebuck, and Co. and Hudsons' Bay. Although the upper and upper middle classes continued to employ seamtresses and tailors, the middle masses shopped and bought underwear by mail or in shops. No longer were most undergarments individually home spun or made, nor were they hand tailored and sewn. Large companies, with their own brand names, "Jockey," "Fruit of the Loom," "Munsingwear," "Sears," or "J. C. Penney," manufactured and sold them. Competition arose as other companies began selling underwear. The t-shirt now was distinguished in part by labels and to a lessor degree, by minute variations in cloth and style. Brand names and associated stylistic variations became bases (since the shirt itself was a simple and undistinguishable item of apparel) for competition, invidious advertising, and marketing. A commodity, it differentiated people by class and life style. The shirt became a distinctive unit in a system of monetary exchange, a commodity produced for sale. Code 3: The shirt as a visible outer garment Perhaps in the early 1960's, t-shirts became visible outer garments. As visible items of dress, they served as status symbols that differentiated status and taste groups, even within social classes. T-shirts were previously unacceptable to the middle classes, because they were viewed as the leisure wear of the tired, "working man at home," shown in the media stereotypically as white, soaked with sweat, stained and torn. The t-shirt as outer wear in the 'fifties had additional and important stylistic or connotative meanings. As shown in movies and plays e.g., " A Street Car Named Desire," it symbolized the raw passions of the unsocialized and proto-rebellious working classes. It signalled animal vitality. The modest, short-sleeved t-shaped, undershirt became more popular as an outergarment, while the "track jersey" style of sleeveless jersey with thin straps and a ribbed bodice was not worn as outer wear. It lost popularity although it reappeared later as a "tank top" style. Changes in the composition of cloth and production technology also contributed to changes in the t-shirt's sign functions. Polyester and other artificial fibers, along with the introduction of "drip dry" cycles on clothes dryers, expanded the range of colors, styles and textures of shirts, and increased their durability. In time, emblematic and multi-colored t-shirts made of new synthetic materials, and blends ??? The mass production of undergarments to be worn as outergarments proceeded apace. Plain cotton shirts were now manufactured in primary colors, some with pockets which indicated they were to be worn in public and meant to hold something the wearer needed, such as a pen, a ticket, a map, or a package of cigarettes. The middle classes could now be seen wearing simple colored t-shirts for social occasions: barbecues, golfing, sailing or other week-end leisure activities. Fashion began to affect t-shirt design. The shirts took on connotative signification that resonated in the social world of fashion. They became widely-available mass produced signs of identity, sign vehicles carrying a variety of signifiers whose referents were themselves and their wearer. They referred to other signifiers and various signifieds within the fashion code. They spoke the language of fashion. Code 4: The shirt as a representational sign vehicle Shirts became an assemblage of signs. They conveyed messages while residing in an "open text" or contained many messages that the reader or observer could interpret (Eco, l986). A range of types of shirts, all communicating a variety of messages about the wearer, his or her experiences, attitude, or social status, appear in the post-1960s era. A connection remained between experience, role and status, and symbolization. The code orders meaning by seeing the t-shirt as a mirror of social relationships. The t-shirt conveys representations that signal or communicate membership in a group, work place or collectivity. Consider how T-shirts now carry emblems, words or pictures (or all three) (usually, in turn, sponsored by business e.g. Gino's Tavern, East "Cats" ; "A Chorus Line" -also at times the name of a forthcoming album-Family reunion, Hood River, 1979; or "I survived my son [or daughter's] wedding") or just an experience ("Veni Vedi, Visa, I came, I saw, I "Free Nelson Mandela"). Others combine a personal name announcement and a team as in the football jerseys that display a name across the upper portion of the back and the team name and number on the front and back. In spite of their ambiguity as a basis for a status or identity claim, the representations on these shirts are in Eco's (1979:135ff.) terms "undercoded." They stand in a synecdochical (a part-the t-shirt-stands for the whole- the self of the person) relationship to some important ostensive experience, social relationship, role, or status claimed explicitly or implicitly by the wearer. The message of the shirt is not only about the club, place, play or business, but about the wearer's status claim: "There is more to my self than what you see ; here's a sample." The viewer is meant to assume that the wearer of an "Oregon" t-shirt with a waterfall on the front has been to Oregon in fact and that this experience, in turn, is significant in some way that the wearer wishes to announce (and or to be asked about, as in the front license plates that ominously announce, "Let me tell you about my identity signals a transition into an extension of this code: a fully ironic reflexivity. The messages or representations found on these shirts, in turn, yield yet another complex and non-exclusive sign function. With increased travel and affluence, and mail order catalogs selling souvenir items, one is no longer required to have been somewhere to make a claim to the experience. Once a shirt is seen, e.g., "Oxford University eights, Spring, 1991," many interpretative possibilities arise. One might have been merely briefly visiting a place (long enough to buy the shirt, to be sure); could have acquired it by mail, or been given it as a gift. It may have no connection whatever to the experience. Although the assumption remains for "souvenir" t-shirts that the wearer has been there, done it, worked there, or had a role in it, one could wear nevertheless a "Sorbonne" or "Cambridge" t-shirt without having been enrolled or visited either. T-shirts are disconnected from direct experience and no longer unambiguously communicate membership status. the degree of doubt and lurking equivocality of the t-shirt based-message are relevant to decoding the communication. The status claims of the wearer remain problematic. As Weber (1960) and C. Wright Mills (1960) noted, any claim to status, if it is to be successful, must be legitimated and deferred to by an audience. It is impossible, on the basis of the t-shirt alone, to interpret with finality the wearer's claim(s). Any message of a t-shirt is equivocal and an audience may distrust the message(s). Could wearing this shirt be the manipulation of a status symbol? What is being claimed from whom by the wearer of such a t-shirt? In other words, the signs and sign vehicles convey ambiguous representational integrity and coherence. The diversity of the codes means that "readings" became more equivocal, and more likely to convey aesthetic or poetic meanings. Code 5: The shirt as a problematic icon Undershirts, as they are commodified and exchanged in part for their image-creating value, no longer directly index experience, action, membership, institutional or social identity. They display signifiers with ambiguous signifieds. They may index experiences or statuses the wearer has not had or does not possess, fantasies, or imagined status honor. Various forms of truth are reproduced and honored. Signifiers float and play on fictive relationships and social identities. T-shirts now speak to manufactured, copied, or fabricated identities, jokes about these identities, or reflections of the purely personal. Here, one might consider how the t-shirt has become the quintessential modern icon. It states something about the wearer and something about the other. T-shirts are sold as commercial jokes e.g. "My parents went to New Orleans, but all I got was this lousy shirt" (worn by a child). Shirts also display stylistic puns, interpersonal provocation and forms of self-mortification, "Old Fart" and a matching shirt reading "Old Fart's wife" ; or "Baby under construction." Shirts contain paired reflexive identities "Why?" (for the putative child) and "Because I say so" (for the adult). Claims are made not to membership, but claims play on the absence of membership : "stolen from" or "property of" Alcatraz, or MSU Athletic Department. One sees floating ephithets such as statements emblazoned on the front of shirts referring to a putative self or identity, usually vulgar, crude, attention-seeking or all three, e.g., "Kissing Instructor," "I don't have a drinking problem : I drink too much, I fall down, no problem," or "Not leavin' til were heavin'." Some are more vague: "Shit happens." Some variations are combinations of the above "Retired. My job is having fun." On an ancient harridan shopping in a local produce market : "I am Not Old. I am a Recycled Teenager." Ambiguous status claims, displayed on a shirt, are made to membership in non-existent groups e.g., "Michigan State Polo Club," "Drunken State University," "Naked Coed Lacrosse (or basketball-"skins vs. skins") team," "Bedrock Varsity" (with pictures of characters from "The Flintstones" cartoons on the front). These modes of communication via a t-shirt in public express claims about what a person is not. This is surely a double negative : a dubious claim to membership in non-existent organizations. T-shirts may function to state longing and desire for status by association or a desire for the absent or unattained. These cloth icons retain some oblique relation to personal referents or are directly but contentiously self-referential. They may index political meanings, reference political ideologies, or have direct referential functions, but the relationships between the field of broader political activities and the person's claims is tenuous at best. T-shirts are useful mini-billboards advertising products as well as displaying selves and identities. At some point, t-shirts to be worn as living advertising were sold or given away by companies such as beer manufacturers. This trend has increased in the last ten years. T-shirts (and hats worn as an integral part of the head) with emblems of the labels of beer on the front, back, or both are sold to be worn as leisure wear: "Budweiser, the King of Beers; Corona-light-cervesa." Companies also now make clothes, t-shirts and other types of leisure wear bearing the names of the manufacturer, "Coca Cola," "Nike" or "Wilson," and sell them in Department stores as mass produced ready-to-wear items of clothing. They are not defined by wearers as advertisements for the product, but as indicative of the status and income of the wearer, loyalty toward or trust in the trademark. They also announce an identity of sorts: I am a person (are you?) who drinks this sort of beer, or soft drink, or wears this brand of sunglasses. Since wearing the clothing made by certain manufacturers connotes a life style, showing the proper label connotes taste, albeit simultaneously advertising the product. An example of this is the Benetton, Ralph Lauren, or Calvin Klein labels, worn or positioned on the garment by the manufacturers to insure that they are read. Thus, a small alligator, a little polo pony and rider, (and their variants by large department store chains that copy them), are also significant. Not only do they symbolize the status that consuming expensive "designer" market label differentiates a T-shirt from those with the symbols of To further complicate the question of reality and copies, copies of the jerseys of professional sports teams with names, insignia, and numbers were mass produced and became widely available. Sporting goods shops sold team jerseys to anyone, and the gray "sweatshirt," worn originally under football pads, or for team sports practice, was worn publicly by those not belonging on teams. Internal differentiation important not only to the manufacturer, but also to the consumer and status-seeker. Code six: The shirt as a walking pun T-shirts, once solely undergarments, are now mass postmodern commodities, insofar as they are intended to display their status as a desirable consumable. Figurative language creates dramatis personae; it connects self and substance. Seeing something in terms of something else can be accomplished semiotically, and once seen as something, the object can refer to itself in these very terms. T-shirts are reflexive and even self-referential. The reflexivity of shirts (the reference to themselves as sign vehicles as well as carriers of other communicating signs) is another kind or level of sign function. It is captured best by the "poetic code" since the message or text refers to itself and to feelings (Jakobson, 1970). Self-reflexive shirts playfully redefine their own slogans, make puns, or covertly or overtly dissemble. They communicate about other signs. They may contain representational or iconic puns, like the sign on a t-shirt reading "this is a t-shirt," "your name here" "Home sweet home" (showing the earth from a distant star) or the t-shirt for physicians that has a white coat, stethoscope, and tongue depressor painted on its front. Happy babies can now wear a "Happy Baby" t-shirt. Some t-shirts show rather complex puns such as the shirt with four illustrations of signing (four hands making letters in signing)labelled "Say it with signing" (a pun on "say it with flowers or "Say it with music"?), or the t-shirt with a picture of two cows melting in a field, entitled "Salvador Diary" (a visual and verbal pun on Salvador Dali's most famous picture, "The disintegration of the persistence of memory"). Emptiness, abstraction and non-referentiality are compounded to produce examples like the MIT t-shirt that reproduces Maxwell's equation (one basis for computing) or a shirt that says in Greek, "Sigma Phi 0 (0 means "nothing" and stands for "omega," the last letter in the Greek alphabet). A t-shirt showing a cat walking along a fire escape was captioned "Cat Walk." One shirt's message, written in french, read (rough translation) "Here is the man who all the others love." Variants on the commercial message t-shirt, presumably playing on the theme of selling oneself, are seen such as the shirt reading "This bud's for you" on the front, a picture of the Budweiser beer label on the back and with "Michigan" printed in bold letters where "Budweiser" is meant to be. A parallell example is the shirt saying "Just do it" (a reference to Nike athletic shoes) and a play on it with the slogan. "Just do me." Both of these example are self-referential and intertextual (see below). Other visual puns are more serious such as the example of iconic memesis (visual onomatopoeia is the term used by Steve Dubin, forthcoming) showing the outlines of Africa set out in black, green and red using the words "Abolish Apartheid in South Africa." In Toronto, two punnish shirts were being offered for sale, one reading "nice dog" on the front and showing a snarling wolf on the back and another showing a pirhana fish on the back and the label "vicious fish" on the front. Some t-shirts pun on deixis such as the t-shirt in a window in Ann Arbor saying "You are Here. Ann Arbor, Michigan," or "This side up." Code seven : Copies and real copies T-shirts are now massively reproduced and distributed. Copies are abundant, but some copies are seen as more real than others (Eco, 1986, 1990). Baudrillard (1988:145) writes, "A possible definition of the real, is that for which it is possible to provide an equivalent representation". Copies can be distinguished (from others, if not from ostensive or putative definitions. For example, National Basketball Association teams license companies to make, merchandise, and distribute "official copies" of their jerseys, hats, shorts, and jackets. The items carry a label : "Official NBA approved souvenir." These items are mass commodities that take meaning within a system of other undergarments. They are "real" when compared to the non-sanctioned official NBA souvenirs. They are also false in the sense that they are not the same coats, jerseys or uniforms produced by the same companies to be worn by the players. In an additional irony of form, basketball teams permit "baseball caps" to be produced and sold with the team name and logo on them. Basketball players do not wear baseball caps when they play professional games, although they may wear them when they play, unlike (4 words missing). T-shirts by the late 'eighties attained a new, additional, iconic sign function. They now referred to and reproduced images found in other formats as well as on other t-shirts. They became self-referential reproductions of reproductions, or representations of representations (Ouspenskii, 1979). One can buy a shirt with the picture of a famous person on the front, a rock star, politician, composer or hero of some kind to someone, or with a picture of oneself generated by photography and computer graphics. The viewer sees simultaneously a double representation : the embodied person and a reproduced image of the person. Of course, one can custom-design a shirt to display and signal anything about anything and have it made up at a custom t-shirt shop. communicating in the context of another), and double-referentiality. Museums, such as the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, sell t-shirts with Dali pictures on the front, a representation of a representation as surely as the t-shirts showing Bart Simpson, the television/cartoon character, screaming "Cool your jets, man!" Shirts are sold with reproductions of the photography of accomplished/ well-known photographers in the center of the shirt, captioned with the title at the bottom and the photographer's name at the top. Consider two t-shirts celebrating heroic victories. The University of Michigan won the championship of collegiate basketball in March, 1989 and shortly thereafter, a t-shirt was displayed in the window of an Ann showing the day's headlines, story about the game, and a nearly full page picture of the Michigan Star, Glen Rice, celebrating after the victory. The same sort of t-shirt was produced by a company sanctioned by the Detroit Pistons after they won their second NBA championship in a row in June of 1990. One t-shirt used the theme "Hammer time," a pun on a song by a rap group, "M.C. Hammer" (the title of the group in turn being a pun), and showed crossed hammers on the back of the shirt along with the another pun, the caption "back to back." (When the Pistons were defeated in the 1991 play-offs by the Chicago Bulls, the "Threepeat" shirts were marked down from 18 to 9 dollars by the morning after the defeat). These shirts reproduce on their front or back newspaper photos originally printed following an event. Although the wearer could have attended the event (t-shirts were sold at the games and after the tournament ended), the shirt locates the person as one wearing a reproduction of a picture of an event. This intertextual display is a reproduction of a picture on a t-shirt reproduced in the thousands for sale. Perhaps it says: "celebrate with me," or "Do you celebrate with me?" and displays an image to be validated. CHANGES IN CODE AND CHRONOTYPE Perhaps another way to examine changes in the meanings of the t-shirt, or semiosis, is to place the shirt in three representational eras or chronotypes, early industrial, late industrial and post-modern, using the units listed above (Cf. Baudrillard, l988). person from local materials (perhaps even grown nearby and woven in the home), and is worn under or with an outer garment and only worn openly in private or in the home or while at hard work. It has utility function while expressing labour and the work ethic. It is white or uncolored, unadorned, functional, worn for protection and/or insulation, and represents the person directly : it displays him or her as they display it. The signwork is direct and simple. after World War Two, the shirt is manufactured, woven and assembled in this country from materials grown in the USA or abroad in standardized sizes for any buyer. It is worn both publicly and privately. It can be worn alone as an outer garment and as such expresses mostly leisure pursuits. It is now colored and adorned, and can express various degrees of informality, depending on color, cut, and emblems. The cut is various and functional, but can be a representation of a sporting jersey. It is now worn in part to display a role, status, or an experience. The shirt, a sign vehicle, is one part of an ensemble chosen to create and sustain an ambiguous display. These shirts are multi-colored, multi-textured, adorned (usually), and signal many contexts. Their relationship to the self and experience becomes more tenuous and problematic, and this ambiguity is often amplified by the particular signs featured on the shirt. T-shirts can be manufactured anywhere using a variety of materials of many textures and cuts. It functions variously and is context-dependent. It expresses mass informality: it is not an occasioned item of dress, but crosses social classes, gender identities, and social situations. It is worn as an item in the uniform of the mass consumer, but can be worn in virtually any setting. It carries iconic puns and displays hyperreality: t-shirts mimic other t-shirts. The postmodern shirt is something of an open text, a functional carrier of signs and signs about signs that variously signify social relations, the self or identity of a wearer and few social constraints govern its content or occasion. The shirts and their signs grasp at fragments of meaning and experience, pun on them, or signify what is not true for the wearer. It signals an image or tentative picture that may be validated by others, but lacks intrinsic meaning absent that validation. COMMENT The three eras summarized suggest global and general change of meaning of the t-shirt. The shirt as a sign vehicle has been modified physically and technologically. Changes in the sign functions of the t-shirt, as seen within the chronotypes, indicate shifts in modern sensibilities and technology : how the shirt was made, sewn, cut and put together, and modifications resulting from the introduction of public standards and aesthetics and the relevance of the iconic code of fashion. As the technological paradigm alters the material capacity of the society to mass-produce shirts, social changes in function, in style, and in setting relevance of the wearing of the shirt occur. The self becomes increasing lodged in public displays of claimed statuses, imagined positions, missing or desired feelings, and the ever-present absent consumable, other selves. In this sense, Barthes' comutative test would suggest that the paradigm of self-reflexivity contains the salient units illustrating these changes in the object. As these change, they signal changes in the other paradigms and their relationships to the system as well. The very idea of "fashion" arises when the shirt begins to manifest differences rather than similarities. The codes into which the t-shirt and its signs, material and visual, have been encoded have changed, as we have noted. Changes in the coding of the clothing reveal or indicate still other social changes. The first code distinguishes the t-shirt within the code of clothing. It had a idiosyncratic or personal kind of self-referential reality for the wearer at that time since the undergarment was a part of the person's clothes, made by the person or someone in the family for him or her. Self and clothes were physically, socially and psychologically close. In the last three codes, connections between self and display are complex, mediated and problematic; the instanciations of the code are very open to multiple interpretations. The signs convey messages that are arbitrary, ironic, commodified, and perhaps even intertextual. The modern t-shirt is close to the person only physically. Shifts in the salience of units within the paradigms suggest that the postmodern perspective illuminates changes in sign functions. That is, style and self-reflexivity indicate the nature of the code and the salience of given signifying functions of the shirt. Signs are fundamental to representation. Changes in the sign functions of the t-shirt represent a change from the shirt as an empirically available physical reality to an interpretant. Questions of question the credibility of the viewer by presenting evocative, floating, adrift and elusive, signifiers that are free from easy assumptions, conventions or social verification procedures. The drift of the shirt as sign vehicle involves changes from misrepresentation (where there may be some sense of contrast between reality and unreality) to dissimulation and dissembling, simulation and new forms of hyperreality. In the latter case, only the reproducible remains. Changes in the vestimentary code suggest that a t-shirt is converted from a useful private undergarment to a publicly displayed physical sign vehicle carrying representations and representations of representations. Shirts increasingly communicate about the fashion system, its connotations, and about themselves. Shirts now mark claims and display fantasies about status honor and wishes for recongition. The features of T-shirts no longer merely mark differences within the code of clothing; they mark distinctions in the imagined- the fantastic world, and fashion's simulacra. These shirts publicly transmit messages about one's self, status, life style, and attitude(s) to life, as well call out for validation of one's absent desires.