do-it-yourself.

I love the do-it-yourself aesthetic. To me, there’s something terribly charming and quaint about handmade goods, something endearing in art or music that’s heaped with humanity rather than stamped with barcodes and wrapped in cellophane. A few weeks ago Angela and I spent the day at a craft fair and watched as individuals hocked purses and jewelry and stationery produced not in sweatshops, but within laundry rooms or garages or back patios that had been gradually converted to single-person factories. Perhaps one of the most striking features of the fair (and the DIY movement as a whole) was the repurposing of old materials into new products—letterpress cards made from recycled paper, purses constructed from tattered books, shoes and belts made from what was formerly a living, breathing cow. I think it goes without saying that I am a staunch supporter of any aesthetic that so motivates individuals to cleverly modify the mundane into the unique and distinctive.

Except when it comes to t-shirts.

And I don’t mean the creating of family reunion t-shirts or even t-shirts meant for public sale. I’m mostly talking to those few misguided, but bold, individuals who feel inclined to add a personal touch to a t-shirt by liberally cutting yards of cloth away from a previously functional shirt. Practically every trip I take to the gym I encounter at least one such soul, whose creativity appears to have no other outlet than the drastic expansion of sleeve holes and necklines. The worst, in my humble opinion, is the fellow who lances off the sleeves in their entirety and cuts an oval down the side of his shirt large enough to fit a vinyl record or large three-topping pizza through. From almost every angle, his nipples are exposed—and if not his nipples, his moles and scraggily, broom bristle-like armpit hairs. He’s essentially undermined the integrity of the t-shirt, robbing it of the very utility it was engineered to provide. A few more snips and that t-shirt would take on the form of a tunic, and few more after that, a spaghetti-strap top or, worst yet, a dangling, ragged necklace.

And while other products, such as those at the craft fair, which proclaim their allegiance to the DIY aesthetic seem to similarly sacrifice their source material for the sake of a new creation, none bothers me the way the surgically dissected gym t-shirt does. Perhaps it’s because a book made into to a purse or a letterpress card constructed of recycled paper does nothing to increase the public’s exposure to big, gross, pepperoni man nipples—the unbridled exposure of which, I must say, constitutes one aesthetic movement that I just can’t get behind.