Shout-Out Shirts
By KAREN SOMMER SHALETT

July 16, 2004

Desire. Calliope. Magazine. Irish Channel. Marigny. Treme. To Locals, these monikers have meaning. They belong to people and are part of the fabric of their community. To tourists, they are quirky words and catch phrases. Visitors aren’t quite sure what they mean or their relevancy, but they provide great fodder for conversation when they get back home.

So, it should be little surprise that T-shirts bearing the names of New Orleans streets and neighborhoods are cropping up throughout town, and being scooped up by locals, tourists and celebrities.

“Since we received the shirts in January, we have sold about 200,” said Allison Rubenstein, co-owner of the stores Ah-ha and All American Jeans. “Half (have been sold) to locals and half to tourists – as well as half to men and half to women.”

Rubenstein and her sister Hilary sell the ringer T-shirts in contrasting colors by Pooch Clothing for $34. The shirts bear the names of city streets, including the Lee Circle T-shirt recently plucked by actress Christina Ricci, as well as Lenny Kravitz’s pick: Tchoupitoulas, the best seller in the sister’s downtown store. “At All American Jeans there are lots of tourists,” Rubenstein said. “Everyone tries to pronounce Tchoupitoulas with an Italian, Japanese – every kind of accent.”

Rubenstein says the appeal to tourists is that the shirts are souvenirs without being beads or T-shirts with drinking slogans.

“You can wear it with jeans and go out,” she said. “And locals like them because it’s where they live.”

The line’s designer, Leah Bauer, believes the appeal of the T-shirt comes in part from city pride, and is also a reaction to the overwhelming preponderance of T-shirts celebrating other cities, particularly New York.

“I got so tired of seeing people buy ‘I Love New York’ T-shirts and shirts that said ‘Brooklyn,’” Bauer remarked. “I wanted to create an ode to our city.”

Worn out of town, the shirts act as a code, Bauer said she was wearing her Tchoupitoulas shirt in the Chicago Children’s Museum when a native New Orleanian immediately approached her to let her know where he was from.

“People keep reinventing ways to express themselves,” she said, “T-shirts have become the new billboards and in the case of these particular T-shirts, people like them because they like to show they are in the know.”

When Wynona Ryder showed up on the cover of W Magazine in 2002 wearing the T-shirt “Free Wynona,” printed by a Hollywood shop, she touched off a trend to make cotton tees the trendsetter’s vehicle of choice for making a statement. Over the next two years, starlets such as Britney Spears and Julia Roberts used their own shirts to send messages through the media to their fans and even their nemeses.

The trend has evolved, however, so that T-shirts have become the hipster’s way to express more than a plea or a grudge. They have been appropriated as the latest way to express one’s identity,

Not limited to “street” fashion, religious affiliations and cultural heritages have been mined and a spate of T-shirts with expressions such as “Jesus is my Homeboy” and “Kosher” have emerged. While the fonts and phrases may seem like kitsch, the message is sincere. The shirts appeal to a generation of twentysomethings who are reclaiming their religious and cultural heritage in a public way.

Like few other cities in the country, New Orleans protects its cultural heritage with an almost religious fervor. Lori and Starbuck Laney were counting on that when they started making T-shirts bearing neighborhood names such as Bywater, Uptown, Mid City, Marigny, and Irish Channel. Positive reaction to the shirts was so strong, it prompted them to open their own store, Metro Three, three months ago.

“Our plan was to make our neighborhood shirts and start selling at Turncoats and other stores around town,” Starbuck Laney said. “But the popularity of the T-shirts was so great, it fueled the opening of our store.”

Laney said when he and his wife launched the collection last fall, he didn’t know of Pooch’s T-shirts nor any New York look-alikes and was responding to a direct demand from friends.

“My wife used to live over in the Marigny and they have a lot of neighborhood pride,” he explained. “So we started talking about making these and people kept telling us to do it.”

In addition to Metro Three’s line of hand silk-screened $18 T-shirts, Laney also produces T-shirts with catch phrases such as “Let’s Mess With Texas” and “N’awlins is For Lovers.” The former, he says, he can’t keep in stock.

In an effort to reinforce city pride, Mayor Ray Nagin’s Care Again campaign has also teed off. The city’s foray into fashion includes a women’s baby doll T-shirt with Desire spelled out in street tiles and a men’s T-shirt that reads ‘I Care,’ in the same motif. Both are priced at $12 and can be purchased via the city’s website, www.cityofno.com.

Meanwhile, both Bauer and the Laney’s have received requests for customized shirts. Homeowners on Arabella Street have approached Bauer, while the Laneys have been asked to make a line of shirts that read “Algiers.” Both requests are being fulfilled.

“People are customizing everything. It’s like creating an underground brand,” explained Bauer. “And you are, no doubt, advertising your status.”