Walking Billboard, Take 2

Today’s youth culture is just as expressive as the culture of the 1960's. Clothes are usually the medium of choice when presenting oneself to peers and society in general. People today can have shirts customized at reasonable prices, allowing a social or political group to use these shirts as a way to express their message. A person can be a billboard to their own cause using clothing. Many college and high school students use t-shirts to convey their strong beliefs, whether it’s a political, social, or personal statement. A person can see their ideas on the shirt and recognize a shared interest. This group of people with a common interest was smaller in the 1960s than today due to lack of globalization. Culture was more regional and ideas did not move as far as they can today. Today’s youth are able to use the canvas of t-shirts to display their style and their personality because the technology and the desire to mass produce printed shirts has increased.


Shirts in the 1960’s were often striped or one solid color. If they had print it was usually in the form of a simple logo or sports jerseys, such as the ones depicted in Skipjack. This was the simple way to express ideas on t-shirts that was available at the time. In the 2000s, t-shirts have a wider range in the content that they bear. Advertisements, music, logos, quotes, images and many other forms of expression on shirts are increasingly common among young adults. Many production companies sell t shirts to their fans, such as the “Super Mega Foxy Awesome Hot”
t-shirts from A Very Potter Musical. These t-shirts usually contain a line from the movie, play, or TV show that all fans can read and remember.


Young adults from the 1960 onward have been depicted as being opinionated, and t-shirts offer them a way to display their inner thoughts and feelings. This is due to the innovation of robots that produce clothing. A computer can design an image and program a robot to create the same image onto the t-shirt faster today then a person adhering letters or sewing on a logo in the 1960s. Globalization has made obtaining these mass produced t-shirts easier than before, allowing a young adult to express themselves and be a part of the greater social group.

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