My New Invisible Friend

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My old pal, well an online friend, perhaps he’s my invisible friend, anyway, Ian Cretney of Invisible Friend has just released his latest collection of revamped and highly original new tees at his fresh and snazzily redesigned site at www.invisible-friend.co.uk. This is probably a collection you won’t be familiar with, and it always surprises me that I.F haven’t had far more exposure than they do, the truth is that it just takes time for the public to catch on to new ideas and new ways of thinking.

To be frank, one of my all-time favourite t-shirts is by this guy, it’s called Dead Rock Stars, he sent me a freebie when I first reviewed the site, totally out of the blue, as you know I don’t ask for freebies to review t-shirts, I do it for the lurve as they say. Anyway, I love that t-shirt to death, which is rather apt, and looking down I’ve just noticed I’m wearing it again! Ian is what I’d call a true craftsman in the field of t-shirt design and production, he’s a dedicated soul who spent the first few years hand screen printing every single shirt, as the business has grown he’s branched out and took on a little help to keep up with demand, (in fact he’s promised to guide me through the art of screen printing so I can start producing my own graffiti posters), but rest assured, the ethos and philosophy of Invisible Friend is still as strong and true as ever.

Trying to pin down exactly what that might be is a tricky thing though, I suppose you could say it lies somewhere in an artistic mind’s interpretation of urban myth, social revolution and music folklore peppered with a healthy dose of cynical humour and a rather laid-back attitude to mortality. Each t-shirt is almost a work of modern art in itself, the iconography lies halfway between graffiti and Post-Modern illustration, the attitude, quirky, irreverent, and with an undercurrent of ever-so-slightly solemnity, which for me is an extremely refreshing change from the usual run-of-the-mill funny one-liners tees you’ll usually come across on the Net. read more

Invisible Friends, Broken Icons and Dead Rock Stars.

admin    T-Shirt Reviews     Sex, T-Shirt Reviews, dead rock stars, elvis evil, hawkwind, hendrix, henge, invisible friend, invisible-friend.co.uk, joplin, malcolm mclaren, punk, t-shirt review, vivienne westwood

Invisible Friend is the kind of friend I’d like, as long as it’s not the crazy kind that will end up putting you in a safe ward for a few months until it’s decided to leave. Nor the kind my sister had as a child either, we were both only a few years old and she’d spend most nights nattering on to her invisible friend, she’d named it “Witch”, and whenever I’d pretend I had an invisible wizard, she’d insist her witch had killed it. I couldn’t see the point of continuing so I let her have the monopoly on fantasy friendships. Things have turned round now, I’m the crazy sibling, she’s the respectable one, I rant all night about t-shirts, whilst she waits for daylight and only talks to people she can actually see.

Invisible-Friend.co.uk first caught my eye when I spotted their sponsored link on Google, I don’t normally follow paid-for links, past experience has taught me that most Google Ads lead you on a wild goose chase, resulting in a page of search results from an inferior search engine. This time it was different, I can’t remember the link text, but the name drew me in, and I wasn’t disappointed. Now I have to be cruel to be kind but I do think the web-site needs a little work, I’d rather get straight to the collection on the home-page, but I can understand why they’d want to prepare you, they have an incredibly strong and graphic style that might scare the pants off the more lily-livered t-shirt punters out there. read more