The Dazed YMC t-shirt launch took place on Sunday, 20 September, in the middle of Dazed‘s own London Fashion Week season, and the timing was not incidental. Two brands that have been in each other’s orbit since the 1990s were marking, simultaneously, their 35th and 30th anniversaries respectively, and the vehicle for the celebration was a limited-edition run of cotton T-shirts pulled from a single advert in the magazine’s July 1996 issue.
Archive as source material: the 1996 Orgy T-Shirt Reissue
The project’s full title, the 1996 Orgy T-Shirt Reissue, demands a small explanation. The source image is a photograph by artist Ollie Dove, in which a group of friends have been arranged into what most viewers immediately read as an orgy. Dove has a different account of the image’s intent. ‘I photographed this image 10 years ago,’ he said at the launch. ‘I was making loose drawings of humans living all over each other, but the drawings weren’t working, so I asked my friends to reinterpret one of them for me so I could photograph it. Everyone thinks it’s an orgy! But in my head, it wasn’t sexual at all. It was about feeling completely overwhelmed by humans and the complications of being human.’
The photograph is printed directly onto the T-shirt, accompanied by the slogan ‘Dazed & Confused Stripper’, lifted verbatim from the original 1996 advertisement. That advert had featured a series of specially commissioned T-shirts made by designers including Richard Voinnet, Christophe Lemaire and YMC itself, making the reissue a kind of double return: the magazine reclaiming its own archive, and YMC reclaiming a design it contributed to three decades ago.
YMC creative director Sage Toda-Nation described the connection between the two brands as something that predates any formal arrangement. ‘YMC and Dazed have always been closely connected, especially in the early days of the brand,’ he said. ‘I’ve always been inspired by the Dazed editorials from that time.’ Dazed art director Ester Mejibovski framed the reissue in terms of attitude rather than nostalgia: ‘We loved the collection’s play on words and felt it perfectly captured the punky, irreverent, put-your-fingers-up attitude that has defined the magazine for the past three and a half decades. It felt right to bring it back.’
The launch event, the campaign and where the money goes
The launch was held at YMC’s east London store, which had been cleared of its usual stock and filled with the new designs. Toda-Nation hosted alongside Dazed editor-in-chief Ted Stansfield, Mejibovski and Dove. Beverages were provided by Ghost Labs. The campaign photographs were shot by Wynston Shannon and styled by Bella Kavanagh, with Dazed colleagues Alice, Luis, Maya, Rae, Percy, Precious and Sam as models, joined by Riley, son of Dazed’s COO.
Both the fabric and the pricing have now been confirmed via YMC (You Must Create)‘s own product pages. The T-shirts are made from 100% cotton; the white version is priced at £55 and a black version, listed as the Day T-Shirt, at £70. Both are available now via YMC (You Must Create)‘s site.
The profits have been divided with some care. All of Dazed’s share will go to a young designer to help fund their next collection. YMC’s share will be donated to Macmillan Cancer Care, in honour of Fraser Moss, the brand’s co-founder and original creative director.
There is a particular logic to launching a project like this during London Fashion Week rather than outside it. The week is saturated with newness and spectacle, and a small, deliberately archival object, priced accessibly and tied to a charitable purpose, reads against that grain. The Dazed YMC t-shirt launch is, among other things, a reminder that the most durable things in fashion are often the ones that were never trying to be durable at all: a magazine advert from 1996, a photograph made on a whim, a slogan that was probably a joke.
