A Rendezvous With The Affair

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Back in 2007, somewhere amidst the grimy boozers and back alleys of London’s East End, began a secret exchange of ideas and broken dreams, a contract of substance over style, a pact was made between Zoltan Csaki and Dave Black. Two intellectual fashion renegades, who vowed to change the face of street wear forever, they made a promise to themselves and the neglected savoir-faire of the urban wear industry that things must change, and thus The-Affair was born. An artistic partnership that has gone from strength to strength, as each new design is release under a cloud of mysterious expectancy, raw talent and shameless egotistic aspirations bucked the trend and defied logic, creating what maybe one of the most intellectually inspiring collections I’ve ever come across.

Inspired by a plethora of influence, deep within the left-field of political and social unrest, classic style and edgy post-modern whim collide in a spectacle of high-brow t-shirts that punch and kick our complacent C21st society below the cerebral belt. Delving deeper than the usual gamut of pop reference, into the nether regions of lost kudos, salvaging the best of the worst in life, turning diatribe on its head, formulating without a formula a series of head-turning, head-scratching t-shirts designed to shock and inspire in equal measure.

Each shirt is made as a limited edition run of 200, screen printed on succulently soft American Apparel tees for a luxurious and stylish cut to suit the most discernible of t-shirt aficionados, veritably the thinking man’s t-shirt designer.

This is Muslim Jesus, look closely and you’ll see the image is constructed from a series of Islamic crescent/star symbols.

Succinctly raising the point that religion and its consequent wars between cultures and nations across the world is nothing more than a pointless exercise in futility. Belief is but a subjective state, there are no definite answers in this lifetime, the nearest we can get to emancipation is the understanding that we are free to choose what we believe and how we practice that belief is our inalienable right. But beyond that, every other human on this planet has those same rights, to choose to believe or not in whatever form of faith, spirituality, logic or reason they want. Religion loses the argument the moment that one man, country or culture decides to destroy another in its name. If there is a god, what kind of omnipotent being would be as petty as to quibble over the slightest nuances of thought of various members of a microscopic race with no real significance in an infinite universe? Interestingly enough, this design was an off-shoot of an earlier idea ‘Personal Jesus’ that uses the same Flash application based engine to replace pixels with symbols. See Personal Jesus here.

L’Enfer (aka Hell) – as the print reads, ‘Hell is other people’ – to be honest I think Sartre has it right, or at least it’s a hell of a slog getting through one of his depressing books. I think my only problem with Jean-Paul Sartre is that’s he was never said anything that people didn’t already know,

Sure people are annoying, they’re the main reason most people can’t enjoy life, for instance right now there are far too many of them, and they’re still breeding. We should probably be shipping a few of them off to another habitable planet by now, but unfortunately we’ve just spent the last few hundred years arguing and tinkering with inventions our great great grandfathers would sneer at. The lavatory, the television, the combustion engine, most of it has been around before any of us were alive, still at least it means there’s always plenty of people out there to buy the junk. War has been the best instigator for most periods of rapid invention and creativity, funny that, in an ironic way I mean, I suppose it’s all swings and roundabouts. You need to have a laugh to have a cry, beat someone up to hug them, live in a ditch to fly to the moon, oh no that would probably only apply to psychotics. Still, you get my point, or else!

Here’s ‘Miniluv‘ or rather ‘Ministry of Love’ in oldspeak from George Orwell’s classic dystopian nightmare ‘1984‘, he also first coined the phrase ‘Big Brother’ although I doubt he thought that so many people would enjoy being watched or watching others, still he had a good head on his shoulders.

As you’d expect from a British novel, the Ministry of Love is where the lead character Winston was brutally tortured, brain-washed and ultimately learned to love Big Brother, not the reality TV series, oh good grief I give up. If you’d actually prefer watching that TV tripe over reading one of the greatest sci-fi classics in the history of man you probably won’t enjoy The Affair anyway :/ For those with a greater intellectual endowment, The Affair offer a brief but welcome rest-bite from a world filled with one-hit wonders and one-liners, in-jokes and in-bred tastes mass-merchandised by a mass-market greedy for a quick fix of nonsensical sensation. The-Affair are the thinking man’s (or woman’s) t-shirt label, what’s more they hark from London which always puts them in my good books. Now don’t think about it too long, they’re all limited editions remember

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