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Why the Slogan T-Shirt Trend Is Back in a Big Way
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'I knew I would get canceled for this,' designer Marie Lueder joked to a reporter after her Berlin Fashion Week show. The most talked-about item in her collection was a tank top that boasted the slogan 'Men are so BACK,' a phrase Lueder says was inspired both by the TikTok refrain 'We are so back' and by the election of Donald Trump and the rise of the far-right AfD party in her native Germany. 'Humor is important as a weapon when you feel powerless,' she says.
In fact, the London-based designer did not get canceled, but she did get more news coverage than she's used to. And she was working in a long-standing fashion tradition. From Katharine Hamnett's antinuclear T-shirts to Dior's 'We should all be feminists' tee, slogan shirts go hand in hand with turbulent times. This season, there were myriad statements to choose from, and designers themselves sometimes served as the models. Case in point: Willy Chavarria's 'How we love is who we are' finale look at his Paris show, part of a collaboration with Tinder and the Human Rights Campaign to raise awareness of the 489 anti-LGBTQ bills introduced in the U.S. in the past year. Or Conner Ives's 'Protect the Dolls' shirt in support of trans rights—which the designer put up for sale online, with all proceeds going to Trans Lifeline.
We first saw political slogan T-shirts gain steam in another tumultuous era, the late '60s, notes Valerie Steele, director and chief curator of the Museum at FIT. The antiwar, civil rights, gay rights, and feminist movements all used the garment to underscore their message. 'It comes out of a protest tradition, and it proliferates very rapidly, because it's an obvious way of communicating a message,' she says. 'It becomes a billboard that you're wearing.' Today, with causes from immigrant rights to trans visibility on the front pages, the landscape has become even more splintered—and so have its style reverberations. Rather than unite around a shared cause, designers were inspired to broadcast specific, and sometimes very personal, sentiments.
Designer Patricio Campillo, who wore his own topical 'El Golfo De México' design to take his bow, notes that 'one of the things that I love about Mexican culture is this ability that we have to satirize complicated situations.' The shirt, which riffed on Trump's executive order that the body of water be renamed 'Gulf of America,' was tongue-in-cheek, made to look like a souvenir that might be sold in local street markets. Like Lueder's tank, 'it went very viral. I wasn't expecting that,' Campillo says. 'It was all over the news, all over people's social media in Mexico and the U.S. I didn't realize how many different opinions were going to be expressed about it. It was a little bit overwhelming, and just for a second, I regretted it. But then I saw how proud Mexican Americans felt about it, and it felt like it was something bigger than me.' He now plans to donate a portion of the profits to organizations supporting transgender people and unaccompanied minors.
That said, he adds, 'I don't think wearing a T-shirt is going to change anything, really.' There is power in a fashion statement, but only to a degree. 'We say in Mexico that it's easier when the griefs are shared, so that was the intention more than anything. I think it's just a symbol should stick together, right?'
A version of this story appears in the Summer 2025 issue of ELLE.
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