| Looking for the perfect shirt to wear while watching Our Friend the Atom? Look no further! Our retro design on a black background expresses optimism about a fantastic technological future heralded by American industry and our friend the TV, accented with real wood buttons (the shirt, not the TV).
100% Cotton barkcloth
Made in the USA.
A really long shirt description:
I can't help but think of this pattern as a salute to the television. I see antennae bent into shapes appropriate for a mobile, dials and TV screens floating in the background. Of course we may each see something different - couldn't the short jagged lines ending in circles be drumsticks, rather than the TV wiring I envision? The pattern is set on a black background. Striking scarlet, school bus yello, white and avocado green shapes along with avocado green wire lines populate this print. It is on barkcloth fabric, which is a type of cotton weave that is denser and more textured than standard cotton fabrics, but is very authentic to the 50s.
Our retro line really recalls the very best of 1950's graphics. The 50s weren't all hip and cool - like most decades, even the 50's fabric was dominated by florals. But when a designer did diverge, what a marvelous thing it was!
You can see the history of florals in some retro prints - but the floral motifs have been reinterpreted as amoebic blobs, highly stylized leaves and flowers that start to seem mechanical. In contrast, often mechanical and scientific figures, such as TVs, airplanes, antennae, tubes, atomic symbols - are drawn as biomorphic - given the contours and lines related to flora and fauna. Take the famous 50s' graphic design of the boomerang - it originated as a reinterpretation of the delta wng jet aircraft, but it flings across the fabric like a living thing.
The book, Famulous Fabrics of the 50s (and Other Terrific Textiles of the 20s, 30s, & 40s) by Gideon Bosker (Author), Michele Mancini (Author), John Gramstad (Author), Bruce Beaton (Photography), Michele Mancini (Author) , John Gramstad (Author) contains several pages of authentic fabric htat clearly originated our own collection. This book attributes the sources of inspiration, or in some cases the very designs themselves to modern artists Jean Arp, Joan Miro and Harry Bertoia. For samples of their work:
Jean Arp - Strasbourg born sculptor. Retrospectives of his artwork were being held in the 50s.
http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_works_8_0.html
Joan Miro, a Spanish surrealist painter and sculputor
http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_works_109_0.html
Harry Bertoia- Italian-born American Abstract Sculptor and Deisnger (1915 - 1978)
It is regrettable that Fabulous Fabrics of the 50s contains only a few pages of retro fabrics, and probably less than 1/3rd of the book contains 50s fabrics at all! Most of the book is dominated by florals from the 20s, 30s and 40s in order to trace the evolution of the 50s' floral design.
The 1950s embodied an exciting post-war utopia built on a new scientific and mechanical frontier. The exhilarating new iconography embodied this dynamism that represented the promise of a new future. Wear one of our retro shirts and represent that very dream!
Additional keywords: atomic, retro, future, lounge, bachelor pad, black |
