Aug

ZeroBoutique.com – From Zeroes to Heroes…

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Che Grovera, Che Guevara, Death, Face Magazine, Kate Moss, Model, Muppets, Pete Docherty, Sesame Street, art shirts, boutique, electro, euthanasia, retro tees, zero boutique, zeroboutique.com

Zero Boutique needs a CSS redesign – drop the html frames, remove the delayed redirect to the blog, move the shop to the home page and you’re set to go. I do understand the desire for a minimalist layout, but the product images could be a tad larger, although I do appreciate the extra modelled photos, especially the cute babes (lol).

Since the original zero website was launched in 1998, they have worked with over 90 artists and in 2002 they launched a new site- ZeroBoutique.com. Over the years, Jason (the guy pushing the buttons and pulling the levers of ZBQ) has expanded the company’s assets from one old heat press for making shirts at home, to a 4 color printing station as well as a far wider range of gadgets and inks and a larger commercial space. All of their shirts are hand screen-printed with love and perseverance in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Zero Boutique promote a great deal of independent artists. you’ll find plenty of old favourites and instant classics here, my favourite being the now almost infamous Che Grovera. An absolutely hilarious spoof of Che Guevara, a highly popular revolutionary image that must have adorned most hippie/political student bedroom walls throughout the 1960s to the current day. I’m not too keen on the white outline, but then again that could be accountable to personal taste.

As you can imagine ZBQ has an enormous back-catalogue of work amassed over the last decade, many of which can be reserved and reprinted if not available, I’d check at the site for more details if you can’t buy the item you want, I’m sure they’ll be very willing to accommodate you! Many of their works have an imperceptible air of the Eighties around them, very retro chic right now, and guaranteed to be a hit with ‘freaks and uniques’ in any avant-garde quarter of your local metropolis.

The Fall of Kate has to be another one of my faves at ZBQ, it sums up the whole problem with the life-cycle of fame, the media gives birth, the media nurtures, the media despises, the media kills.

The word ‘media’ comes from the Ancient Greek word for ‘many headed beast’, I’m assuming that mass-media is even worse, an even bigger monster than the Greeks could’ve imagined.

Poor old Kate Moss, she had the looks, the East End Cockney Mafia connections, a great career in modelling and an unlimited supply of cocaine, and then she met Pete Docherty and life went ‘tits up’ after that.

Here we can see her nose bleeding (yet again), she could’ve probably got away with it for years if she hadn’t met Pete, I’m sure a vast majority of models take coke, a few decades back it would’ve been speed (which used to constitute the main ingredient for most diet pills), but now it’s coke and these bimbos – I don’t care how many degrees you have if all you do is spend your time as a coat hanger – are losing their faculties, their bearings and their pride of place in the glossies and the tabloids.

The thing is Kate survived, I’m sure she took a reality check the moment she came down, she took one look at Pete and thought wdf? Anyway she’s back on her feet you’ll be glad (or not) to know. She’s still got her Revlon campaign to pay the mortgage bills and everything else I sure is jsut about free.

Models don’t eat, if they do a pop star or footballer is most likely paying (and it won’t be much). They don’t pay for clothes, well of course there has to be some perks to the job. They don’t pay for a night out, her ‘people’ have made sure she’s on the list for everywhere (until her first wrinkle appears). What’s left? Well, as they say, you can’t buy love. Wipe your nose Kate.

Killbots 2 for some strange reason reminds me of the poster campaign for Pulp Fiction by Quentin Tarantino, perhaps it’s the pose or the angle and aim of the handguns, whatever it is, it works. It’s essentially the reduction of violence to it’s absolute minimum, why send a man to do the work of a machine. Death has become automated, robotic, and these days the clean, efficient and quick processing of the dead is more akin to Maccy D’s than a religious ceremony. Time, as always, is money, and the more funerals you can knock out a day, the higher you can pile those coffins, or the faster you can burn those bodies, and thus, the more cash you make. Did you know that many people who attend a cremation of their loved one ends up taking home the remains of a stranger? Some crematoriums don’t even crush the bones, perhaps they donate them to the local dogs home, who knows. What I do know is that there’s no way of guaranteeing a crematorium hasn’t simply taken a scoop of ‘mixed ashes’ and handed them over in a fancy urn. Well not unless you insist on waiting at the other end of the conveyor belt.

The style of this t-shirt takes me back to the early Eighties; Toshiba ads, Street Sounds Electro album covers, I.D and Face Magazine, even perhaps a touch of Tron. That was around the time I first saw body-popping and robotics, yes it was really popular to pretend you were a machine back then, now it’s the other way round, machines are pretending to be human. Scientists are learning to replicate every human function, and eventually we’ll have a machine for every job out there, and they’ll get the worst jobs possible. Mining, deep sea exploration, labouring in toxic and nuclear environments, and killing. The US government have had quite a lot of success with ‘drones‘, essentially they are little more than remote controlled miniature bombers right now, but they do pack a punch, and have been heavily used to target terrorists in Afghanistan. Recently one of them spotted a lost tribe in South America, fortunately that one was only armed with a camera.

Worst still are euthanasia machines, if governments understood that some people’s lives, be it through debilitating disease or suffering, are so bad, that death would be a release from a terminal illness, then qualified practitioners would at least be able to witness the event, offering some form of emotional comfort in their last moments. Instead they get a bleep, a beep, or a whirr and it’s over.

Well I must admit that ZBQ have taken me to hell and back here, inspiration-wise that is. They offer plenty of food for thought in their designs, perhaps some of the edgiest tees I’ve reviewed so far. There’s a vast difference between merely making a fashion statement and a statement on life, and I believe that DBQ have managed to blend the two to perfection. Go and see if you agree at ZeroBoutique.com

As an extra incentive I’ve managed to blad a discount code of ZBQ – just quote BUYTEES in the comment box when you order for a whopping 10% refund!