Crooked Monkey - Let the girls ‘tees’ the boys!

CrookedMonkey.com was originally conceived by two high school buddies based in Maryland. Within a few years they secured their first department store contract and since have expanded to over 550 retails outlets across the globe, some of their most famous retailers including Urban Outfitters, Nordstrom, Lord and Taylor, Kitson, ShopIntuition.com and Fred Segal. Now that is what I call a success story!

This success is almost all down to Crooked Monkey’s clean, crisp, and outrageously cheeky designs. The key to a successful t-shirt design relies upon two factors, good if not great illustration skills, and the ability to project an idea into the public consciousness as precise and succinctly as any major advertising or political campaign, and in all truth I have a feeling that these guys could do better than most of the contenders out there right now.

I was told by more than a few tutors at Uni that I should seriously consider approaching (begging) ad agencies for a bottom-rung-of-the-ladder position at a London agency until I had proved myself with a series of dazzling advertising campaigns. The truth is they wouldn’t let my big toe, let alone my foot in the door. In fact as I recall it was usually placed firmly in my mouth by officious lower management looking for psychology graduates. I’m glad they didn’t want to know, I am far too subversive for the advertising trade, and so are most good t-shirt designers, including the Crooked Monkey team.

We challenge the status quo, we break the mould, we don’t “reinvent” and “repackage” the same old junk and hope you don’t notice. We point out the foibles of government, culture, relationships, popular misconceptions, we love mistakes! Something I really appreciate about Crooked Monkey is the way they have tapped into the Zeitgeist of our day, they offer a fabulous range of tees for men and women, and in all honesty, a hilarious tableaux of a cultural and ideological war of the sexes.

I particularly enjoyed this selection of women’s tees - hopefully they’ll bring “Play Musicians” out of retirement one day - I’d recommend limited edition print runs based upon a voting system for their classic designs, tastes change so fast these days that most good ideas regularly return to the spotlight.

I Recycle Boys T-Shirt	I’m So Over You T-Shirt	I’ve Had Better T-Shirt	Play Musicians T-Shirt

Women will particularly appreciate about these tee-shirts is the time and hassle they save, this kind of iconography can be classed as a modern “sign language”, our culture relies on the shorthand provided by cultural signs and symbols to bypass the long-winded interactions of the past. These t-shirts are what I would describe as “time savers”, i.e they control their immediate environment, they position a woman culturally in the moment, defending her from unwanted attention from the “wrong kind of guys”. Men with a sense of humour and a strong appreciation of irony will do well in the future, this is simply equality at work. We’re not talking “ladettiquette” here (I just invented that word!) - a ladette is defined as young women who behave in a boisterously assertive or crude manner and engage in heavy drinking sessions - no, we’re simply talking about human nature and it’s way of redressing the balance, plain old fair play.

The age of political correctness is coming to an end, it was a tiresomely ineffectual movement, at first there was obvious progress, the Media embraced news stories of “difference and indifference”, the imbalance across the world between the salaries of men and women (very little change there), race relations, especially in highly populated urban conurbations, the “re-branding of disability”, and the end of political bias towards one strata of society over another (you wish!). The point is it didn’t work, soon the newspapers and stations were picking holes and eventually great chasms in the argument. For instance “positive discrimination” in the workforce, in politics, in general it was an awful mistake. The most sexist thing you can do is base your decisions purely by gender, the most racist by creed, and yet that’s exactly what many many governments tried to enforce throughout the 90’s with “positive discrimination”, how exactly can discrimination be positive anyway? The truth is we needed to bring attention to every injustice possible, worldwide communications technologies meant we finally could, but what we couldn’t do is tell people “how” to say what they wanted. That’s the beauty of free speech.

That’s also the beauty of Crooked Monkey’s designer t-shirt collection. I totally appreciate their straightforward attitude to slogan text and iconic image. Many of their font choices are typographically perfect when combined with punchy retro graphics, all of which creates a feeling of subverted nostalgia. Playing mix and match with a plethora of graphic cultural references from the 1950’s to the present day, they have managed to both blur the boundaries of social decorum, whilst still maintaining the desirability factor so essential to a successful fashion item.

There are also many unisex designs at the store, which I personally find a very refreshing trend, and unlike some tee stores I have visited, the designers have a strong understanding (and probably a lot of feedback from their fans) of what can and what can’t cross the gender divide. I believe that this design, “I don’t do lines” has accomplished that difficult task with aplomb.

It literally is unisex, you really can’t get more unisex than this. No one likes a cheesy pick-up line, yet in a strange way it is still progress. The fact that there are so many women out there confident enough to make the first move, who know who they are, they know what they want, and yet reassuringly, when it boils down to it, they are as corny as the guys they meet. We’ve entered a Humanist Age, a time where men and women can finally sit down and agree that being a jerk isn’t dependent on your sex, sexuality, colour, but simply your own personality, your own behaviour, your own individual understanding of the culture around you

Crooked Monkey’s shirts are available from a very reasonable $22.50 to $25 and come in 3 sizes; small, medium and large. They offer a wide range of highly popular t-shirts for both sexes, their following was until recently, predominantly male college and university students. However as their range and retail distribution network has expanded, more and more women are turning to Crooked Monkey for that rarity in women’s tees, an edgy pithy style. Unlike the swathes of “pretty vector” tees out there lacking any real content or meaning, Crooked Monkey’s products “do what they say on the tin”. They provide a refreshing frankness and ease of communicating their message without ever overloading the design or losing their core audience’s attention.

This is not the place for flowery ideas and glib sentiment. if you are a woman who wants less aggravation in your life, if you want to save time on telling the guys you can’t stand or totally adore, where to go or what to do, CrookedMonkey.com can hook you up with the best fashion artillery for any great night out. Hey guys - don’t worry I didn’t completely forget you - you can get your own back here!