There’s a palatable horror when one sees a tie-dye T-shirt. It’s the recoil you get when overwhelmed by the mental image of the wearer sipping rare brews of herbal tea, talking about fracking and possibly being a minor member of the Manson family. “I hate tie-dye T-shirts,” Kurt Cobain told Melody Maker in 1992. “I wouldn’t wear a tie-dye T-shirt unless it was dyed with the urine of Phil Collins and the blood of Jerry Garcia.”
Get her.
The tie-die print, previously a signifier of arrested development and surfers in Newquay, has returned as the go-to pattern for conveying a rebellious, IDGAF attitude. Exactly the kind of thing, some would say, that Cobain stood for. Now labels such as Saint Laurent and Elder Statesman have made the vertiginous pattern almost haute.
There was a change in the air a few years ago when the pattern was re-appropriated by the hip hop scene; XXL magazine hailed it as “the new black” when rappers such as Chance the Rapper, Tyler the Creator and ScHoolboy Q wore the acid-washed look on their T-shirts and bucket hats. Meanwhile, designers such as Alessandro Michele for Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Tillmann Lauterbach and Lou Dalton all used the pattern.
Cut to summer 2016 and it’s hard to avoid photos of post-Yeezus Kanye West going for the acid-fried look, pairing ripped jeans with bong-ready tops, while Justin Bieber has been dotting his emergence as a post-enfant-terrible with swirly, whirly patterns on his Fear of God jeans. Inevitably, Jared Leto wore the design at Coachella, and even Chris Martin’s One Outfit features a coat with blotchy tie-dye prints.
It’s the pattern that has been embraced by fashion, but it probably hasn’t completely removed itself from wearers who will probably get the munchies at around, ooh, 3am.
