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Have you ever wanted to take a selfie, but your outfit was seriously holding you back? No? Well, um, should that ever happen, London-based designer Timur Kim is here to save the day. The 25-year-old has launched a collection of “selfie T-shirts” (yes, really), a unisex line of graphic Tees specifically crafted for optimal self-portraiture.
“When you’re doing a selfie, you capture only the face and the area below the neck,” Kim tells Style.com. "What makes these shirts perfect for taking selfies is that all the designs are concentrated around this area. Everything is in the right place for the photograph.”
Okay, a shirt made just for selfies is ridiculous, yet there’s something sort of brilliant about it, too. For one, this is really savvy marketing. If Instagrammers — especially hip, attractive, and maybe even influential ones — actually do snap themselves in Kim’s shirts, that’s free publicity. And two, Kim has a self-awareness and irony that elevates these shirts from cheap gimmick to sly cultural critique. He tells Style.com: “The selfie is a huge phenomenon, especially in fashion, because [fashion] is such a self-centric industry. We all want to be part of it. We all want to be exposed, often through the clothes we wear and the style we choose. So, I thought, why not get people to take a selfie in my work?”
Perhaps other designers should begin thinking in terms of selfie-friendliness. (Garment-specific hashtags printed on every label?) For now, selfie fashion seems more like a funny conceptual-art project than anything else — it’s just that in Kim’s hands, it has the added bonus of being an actually cute, commercially viable one. (Style.com)
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