ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the results of a three-day observation of the dress of students at a college event. Categories for the analysis of tee shirts were generated by participant observation. The tee shirt is the uniquely postmodern medium that young people have found to speak out. A profound concern with brotherhood, sisterhood, and fellowship across social boundaries was, to their credit, dramatized on youths’ bodies. Mass society itself arises from the interests of a few persons consolidated in an elite to preprogram the behavior of a mass enlarged as much as possible, in ways compatible with the interests of that elite. The phenomenon of the tee shirt, as with other graffiti, is a parallel symbolic system by which people, usually young people, attempt to create a social-life world that resonates with their own preferences and affinities. Superefficient textile factories, superproductive sweat shop industries, superaesthetic advertising firms combine to colonize the desire of young men and women for social honor.
