The Clothes Are the Message

Usually, it is considered rude to stare at someone’s chest. Ms. Manners might cut people some slack for ogling college coeds, however, if she knew the real source of interest: the witty sayings emblazoned across the front of students’ T-shirts.

“I always read other people’s shirts,” says Margot Miller ’08. And on Pomona’s campus, she has plenty of reading material, some of which is literally literary. Elizabeth Levin ’08, an English major, owns a shirt that says “WWJD” on the front, but anyone expecting the back to bear a “What Would Jesus Do?” Bible verse is in for a surprise: a portrait of the author Jane Austen, the true “J”-named guru in question. “I make a point to wear the shirt when I give campus tours,” Levin says. “I like giving that impression of the school. … Pomona students are academics in the best sense of the word and the nerdiest sense of the word.” Luckily, with The OC’s geeky Seth Cohen as a sex symbol and pasty rockers like Death Cab for Cutie selling out shows, it’s hot to be uncool. “The age of the jock has ended,” Levin declares.

That demise is fortunate for Clifford Wu ’08, who owns a shirt that “appeals to two different groups—the tech nerds and English language nerds, both groups of which I’m part.” The shirt in question has a graphic of two animals positioned in what initially appears to be a risqué sex act. But look closer—the animals’ shapes are made out of letters, spelling the phrase “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” As Wu explains, “The tech nerds will recognize (the phrase) as a cool trick in Microsoft Word (type “=rand()” and then the return key to see for yourself), and students of the English language know that the sentence is the shortest one using all 26 letters in the alphabet. … It personally appeals to me because the sentence was the basis of an Encyclopedia Brown mystery, and man, did I really enjoy those books when I was young.”

Miller agrees, “The shirts I ultimately drop cash on are the ones that resonate personally with me. … That allows them to work more effectively as ice breakers.” One of her shirts that ropes in the most introductions says, “Cowboys Make Better Lovers,” which the Texan born-and-raised Miller says unfortunately garners attention from more creeps than rodeo fans.
Other students also use their shirts to show off hometown pride. Brendan Balke ’09 still wears a shirt that he and some friends made during high school in Grand Junction, Colo., that boasts membership on the “Grand Junction High School Rock-Paper-Scissors Team.” “That shirt was part of a huge, elaborate joke,” Balke explains. “We even had an application you had to fill out. … I guess we had a lot of time on our hands sophomore year, and instead of doing drugs and having unprotected sex, we formed a rock-paper-scissors team. The shirts went for about 10 bucks, so there may have been a little profit motive involved as well.”

Peter Enzminger ’08 highlights his home in the Golden State with a shirt that reads “Oakland is for Lovemakers.” He estimates that three or four people comment on the shirt every time he wears it. “I suspect this is because people expect the phrase to read ‘Oakland is for Lovers,’ which many think is patently incorrect in the first place,” he explains. “No one hearts Oakland like someone would heart NYC; Oakland’s image is just not as a city for lovers, but as a grittier, more concrete city. … The Lovemakers are also a band, pop in the tradition of Duran Duran, and yes, they are from Oakland. … Nobody really knows about (them).”

T-shirt manufacturers know that they can connect with college students through sexual innuendos, and Pomona students have bought into the message—on their own terms. Julie Trescott ’08 has a shirt featuring a graphic of a young woman peering out over the top of her glasses, with the words “Reading is Sexy” above her. Trescott bought the shirt after seeing Gilmore Girls’ Yale-attending protagonist, Rory, wearing it on the show. “It is the clothing item that I most often receive compliments on,” she says. “Occasionally, people poke fun at me for being a nerd, which is OK, since it’s totally true.”