The story of your life, in shirts
Don't hoard or toss clothes you love — "dopely transubstantiate" them into other forms!
Welcome to Blackbird Spyplane.
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— Jonah & Erin
One of the many unbeatable things we do here is a recurring bespoke wisdom drop called “Personal Spyplane.” You, the beautiful & blessed members of Spy Nation, ask us burning questions about life, love and the jawn sciences. And we reply with the kind of profound, definitive answers you just don’t see as much as you’d like in our degraded culture these days ...
And Lo… today we’ve got a fantastic Q that will have intense relevance to (statistically speaking) 100% of Spyfriends:
“I’m trying to consolidate my s**t in preparation for a big move, and I’m reckoning with my t-shirt archive. What do you do with tees that have sentimental value, or are otherwise interesting, but that you can’t imagine wearing again? Like, I’m not gonna just toss a Daft Punk Alive 2007 tour tee. I don’t really want to sell it, but it also seems insane to keep doing what I’ve been doing and storing them all in a Rubbermaid bin and looking at them once every two years. I feel like the path forward is acceptance that tees are meant to be worn until they transition into rags for household tasks, but I am curious for feedback from Spy Nation.” — @terminal_avenue
We’ve made the case before against compulsively ridding your wardrobe of pieces whose luster has momentarily dulled, or whose style does not feel as “au courant” as it once did. Instead, we encourage going B.I.G. B.U.C.S. mode, where you put pieces you stopped wearing into “swag archival” storage rather than liquidate them outright.
This is wise not only because of the economic benefit (i.e. when your mind changes and garment x comes back in style, which tends to happen, you’ll have a piece you already own waiting for you, rather than “needing” to buy a new one) but also because, at their best, clothes are potent mementos of past versions of you. They become imbued with all kinds of slow-ripening significance that you might not appreciate today: Some clothes are deeply enmeshed in your personal history and — much like a book you loved in high school, then forgot about for a decade, only to pluck it off the shelf one day and be transported by great things in it you once loved and / or missed the first time — they’re worth keeping close by, so you can revisit and re-rock a powerful component of your own identity, baby!!
This remains very good advice. However, this Spyfriend’s question is specifically about dealing with a storage shortage and, what’s more, it’s not a question about all clothes — it’s about graphic tees in particular. And a profound graphic-tee-specific idea occurs to me off rip…