Magliette Molto Belle, literally “very beautiful t-shirts”, is an experiment on pushing the limits of a project towards the bottom. The goal was to work with zero budget, no ideas and a sloppy execution. This is why everything regarding this improbable brand, starting from the logo, was done with my left hand. The designs from this first series are terrible knock-offs of iconic tees. They have embarassing titles that try to present them as original ideas.
There is also a zero budget advertising campaign for the project that can be seen below. What is actually not cheap is the manufacturing: for this limited edition I chose high-quality sustainable cotton t-shirts that where screen printed with professional tools and best quality colors.
The product
“t-shirt inspired by an Argentinian revolutionary”
“the one with the crock”
“the greek goddess of victory depicted as a banana”
“t-shirt of a band you probably don’t know”
Making the product
A stupid product needs a stupid manufacturing method: all these designs were born through a needlessly elaborate process. Each design stars out as a bad sketch made with a marker on paper. I then slide the paper under the front of a tee-shirt and trace the lines with a brush. This prototype t-shirt is then layesd out flat and photographed. The photo is then post produced and fed into a vector software that converts the pixels to vectors. Only at this point can we begin with screen printing. Very lengthy indeed.
The communication
This fictional advertising campaign also pushed the limits on poor process. It was carried out with zero budget (and with no photographer at hand) simply using pictures that were freely available on Google and putting them together to form human figures dressed in MMB, each made from parts of a wide number of different subjects. These Frankenstein-like models all embody a stereotype and have at least one vintage reference somehow related to the stolen and “umpteen times” seen t-shirt design each is promoting.
Advertising images were prepared also for designs that didn’t make it to production, such as the “man in the air with a baseball mitt” or the “enhanced horses of Mr. Ferrari”.
