If you've been living in this country at least 15 years, odds are you have a T-shirt collection. Odds are also that you can't remember where half of them came from, although, thankfully, it's usually spelled out for you in chunky type. I was in a volleyball tournament? I signed up for that credit card offer? And really, what fashionista in the Bay Area wears your standard men's T-shirts? They're big, they're boxy, they're shapeless -- in other words, terribly unflattering.
The wonderful thing is that an ugly old T-shirt taking up space in your drawer can become something much, much better with a good-quality pair of scissors and a little ingenuity. You can cut new necks or sleeves and holes in strategic places, do lacing or ties. With two swipes of the sewing machine, a boxy shirt becomes a baby T. You can do shirring or ruching (i.e., making attractive wrinkles or bunches), make ruffles or add lace or ribbons, safety pins or other embellishments. T-shirts can become skirts, shorts or bags.
Even though punk rockers slashed their sleeves off decades ago and other examples of altered clothing states existed long before that, it appears that over the past five years a do-it-yourself trend known as "T-shirt surgery" or "T-shirt reconstruction" has taken off. On the LiveJournal blog (livejournal.com), a community known as "t_shirt_surgery" has exploded from a handful of members when it started in late 2002 to more than 13,000 at last count.
Stores like Needles and Pens in San Francisco and Oakland's Rock Paper Scissors Collective and Cyzuki Industries sell handmade wares and reconstructed T's. Places such as Stitch Lounge and the Sewing Workshop in San Francisco have offered classes on the subject. Even chain stores like Urban Outfitters and Abercrombie & Fitch have gotten in on the act -- selling clothes that look like the result of T-shirt surgeries.
And then there are books like "Rip It: How to Deconstruct and Reconstruct the Clothes of Your Dreams" (Fireside/Simon & Schuster, $15) by fashion designer Elissa Meyrich, published last month. Filled with 190 pages of tips and techniques, the book is a paperback version of the class she teaches at her Sew Fast Sew Easy studio in New York.
In March, Berkeley-raised sisters Faith and Justina Blakeney -- along with friends they met in their adopted hometown of Florence, Italy, Anka Livakovic and Ellen Schultz -- will publish a book called "99 Ways to Sew, Trim and Tie Your T-Shirt Into Something Special," a step-by-step guide for altering your T's with just scissors, needle and thread. If that's not enough options for you, "Generation T: 108 Ways to Transform a T-shirt" by Megan Nicolay -- who runs the Generation-T.com Web site -- will hit bookstore shelves in April.
In the fall, San Francisco's Melissa Alvarado, Melissa Rannels and Hope Meng, founders of the Stitch Lounge, will publish their first book in a series to help wannabe T-shirt surgeons, "Sew Subversive," which gives a basic introduction to sewing, with important tidbits like how to thread a sewing machine, as well as 20 how-tos for refashioning projects.
Hayley Williams, of Tomball, Texas, a co-founder of the LiveJournal forum, remembers how shocked she was when her online community, where people post T-shirts they've altered and sewing instructions, took off.
"A friend and I were talking about how cool it was to fix up all those plain band T-shirts that we had," Williams says. "And she was like, 'Dude, we should totally make a community.' I thought that it was just going to be a few people and be kind of a dead community. But it just started growing and growing and growing. And now, it's thousands and thousands of members. It's insane."
"Now you're seeing it all over the place," Alvarado of Stitch Lounge says.
"People are doing deconstruction of T-shirts in, like, Us Weekly magazine. It's like the cool new thing to do. Even just the idea of taking control of your fashion and what it says about you."
The Stitch Lounge in San Francisco's Hayes Valley sprang out of the notion of reconstructing clothes. Three childhood friends, Alvarado, Rannels and Meng -- all crafty women with un-crafty majors: engineering, math and economics -- pictured opening a space where you could buy old clothes and then alter them on the spot. With some help from the Women's Initiative for Self-Employment, a nonprofit business school, as well as volunteers and donations, the three made their dream a reality in June 2004.
