Dazed Digital chats with Ritchie Chan about his new initiative, Project White T-Shirt, a global campaign enlisting the efforts of top designers, allowing them to create a new and interesting silhouette out of the classic white tee. Below is a more detailed description of the project and the individuals involved in making Project White T-Shirt come to fruition.
Charity and t-shirts have gone hand in hand so many times that we wonder whether 'yet another designer t-shirt collaboration all in the name of charity' will grab out attention. Certainly the name Project White T-shirt brings to mind other similarly spirited collaborations, what with humble white t-shirt being the perfect canvas for any designer to apply their signature. What marks Project White T-Shirt out though is the type of designers that have been chosen to partake in this project. Ritchie Chan of creative studio/agency Triple Major scoured the world looking for designers that could potentially do something genuinely interesting with a t-shirt.
The 31 names involved, include Andrea Crews, Bruno Pieters, Pelican Avenue, Slow and Steady Wins the Race, Daniel Palillo and other contemporary avant-gardists that are mainly still carving out a signature for themselves and so we look to their t-shirts with curiosity. Looking at the designs that are all exhibited online, these aren't lazy efforts on the part of the designers. Chan personally ensured this was the case by visiting almost every designer to make a video of the process of each white t-shirt interpretation. Some designers have made simple shape adjustments and some have taken their tees out of a wearable context altogether. Just to cite a few of the creative endeavourts the designers have taken their tees, we have a marshamallow covered shirt from Swedish collective Doktor Doktor, a spider web cut-out tee from Kling by Kling and a Mundi t-shirt that went travelling around Iceland for six days and thus accumulating that expedition's imprints.
The rest of the Project White T-shirt story is a simple one; the t-shirts will be going on exhibition around the world and then they're up for auction and all proceeds go to Designers Against Aids. They're currently swishing around in a giant laundromat at L.A. Boutique Welcome Hunters and then they go to Space 15 Twenty Gallery.
