This design takes its inspiration from the old ‘Keep Britain Tidy’ slogo (yes I’ve just invented a new word… logo + slogan = slogo). Essentially it comments on the lack of love in the modern world. I’ve been with my partner for years and as yet neither of us has run off or tried to kill the other. Yet when you take a look at current divorce rates you’d be hard pressed to find a marriage that lasts as long as fifteen years, by the way we didn’t get married. Maybe that’s the trick. Al that legal mumbo jumbo probably puts a dampener on most marriages to be, plus there’s the cost, the heightened expectation, and the final realization that married life sucks.

I believe most peopled get married out of boredom, exhaustion, and even just to escape the dating scene, which from over here seems to be more nightmarish than ever. Sure you can do loads more people, but none of them give a damn about you, what goes round… It’s been commercialized - dating is a scene - an act, a long drawn out and badly written play. Almost everyone under thirty is on stage and performing, and a lot of older divorcees  are starting to do the same.

A guy has to get on a bit before he realizes there’s more to it than sex, a lot of women are following suit now, in fact one day I doubt there will be anything other than f*ck buddies and lifelong partners,  I can’t see marriage lasting in the West. Sure you have your strongholds,  religion plays a big part in it.  Catholics  will always give it a go, for most religions  believe there’s no way getting around it. Their whole society is based on the foundation of marriage. I’ve noticed a lack of that reverance in UK politics ever since Blair left… phew. Society isn’t based on marriage, my parents hated each other. Society should be based on mutual respect. But what do I know?

Heartbreaker as with all my tees is available in over 30 styles and shades. Sweats, Tees, Hoodies, come and see the whole collection at www.retrogod.com

This accidentally came out as a rather Japanese Manga style tee. It’s inspired by all the sleeping businessmen I saw at Budapest Airport recently. I started to imagine what a wannabe tycoon would dream of and made a sketch. I only found it again recently and thought it’d be a great t-shirt design.

To be honest I so hope I’m wrong about businessmen’s dreams, sexy ladies, fun in the sun, the good old days, anything but master plans for world economic domination. As a kid there were lads who pulled the legs of insects, tied cans to cats’ tails, shoot birds with air rifles. I found it horrifying, I didn’t mind a fight, I used to watch ‘Monkey’ - an old 1970’s dubbed Japanese Kung-fu proggy for kids. I bought a bamboo stick like the kid next door and we used to fight on top of a garage. But he was my equal, it was a challenge.

The difference with most people and businessmen who want to dominate the world is that they have a different attitude to competition. Destroy the weakest, the poorest, those with the least influence in the world, and then work your way up.

I’m in no position to complain. The Net, this blog, the duff laptop I’m using to write it, everything that enables me to be here is due to a competitive market. I just think it’s a little sad that for someone to get everything, everyone else must lose out. Don’t worry I’m not going all Commie on ya, I know there isn’t a political solution. Perhaps as resources become scarce (to the extreme), self-sufficiency will present itself as a medium for empowerment of the individual. Who knows, perhaps it’s just a pipe dream.

Pipe Dream

A massive Escape Button surrounded by crowds of tourists. It would be nice if we all could really get away. Another planet, another dimension, somewhere where you’ll meet few if any humans.

My partner would always point out beauty spots of the countryside whenever we travelled on a motorway. Not so much now though. I heaped a debate on her, and she wasn’t really asking for one, but I did anyway. It went something like this…

What actually enabled us to see these beautiful places, from afar, from a car. The motorway (or freeway if you want me to go all American on you - besides that’s probably a misnomer by now anyway… I mean with the amount of toll roads these days I doubt few of them are actually free anymore.).

If you can see a beautiful place from somewhere as ugly as hell, you are spoiling the view. It’s kinda difficult to quantify what spoils a view. I have no problem with Wind Turbines for instance, I know a lot of nimbys do (nimby = not in my backyard). A blott on the landscape for me has more to do with function than form. It’s not how it looks so much as what it does, or rather how efficiently. All the Post Modernists back me up on this, form and function is a symbiosis of two essential disciplines. Anything that strips one from the other is a failure as far as design is concerned.

A wind turbine is essentially a beautifully ugly thing. It’s beauty comes from the knowledge that it does little if any damage to the environment in as efficient way as possible. From the belief that it is the way of the future, anon-polluting one at that. There are areas of the UK that won’t let you put up a satellite dish because it spoils the look of a listed village, a historical town, a heritage centre. I love history, but if it meant isolating myself from the present then I’d rather give it the heave-ho. Imagine what all those nimby council planners think about solar panels and wind turbines. Here’s a quickie, how about a wind turbine on every church steeple (how many are left now?) and disguise the top with a weather vane. It would be ugly, it would be inefficient, but if it gets past the beady eye of a planning officer with a heavy historical bias then it would be worth it.

Motorways are ugly. Cars can be beautiful in their own way, from a design perspective I mean. But get a thousand in a tailback with a cloud of smog overhead and you’re not painting a Turner are you? Until cars can hover we are stuffed. Let’s face it, we won’t have any countryside to tear through within fifty years. Even if we do learn to hover, we’ll still have difficulty seeing anything through that smog. How many years does it take to clean the sky anyway?

Getting back to the point, you can’t see beauty without ruining it, if man get’s his dirty mitts on anything beautiful, whatever his intentions, he does usually end up ruining it. I know we’ve got a few National Trust parks, they still get the smog but at least they’re not twelve lane bypasses for nearby cities. But what about the rest. It takes millions of years to form a landscape, man has always played with it, digging a tunnel here, building a bridge there. But now he can flatten it, raise it, put it out to sea, you name it. By the way - how long will those ornamental islands in Dubai last now that we know the world’s sea levels are rising?

Yes, yes, this has entry has turned in to one of those awful eco-rants you read just about everywhere. I’ll stop badgering you, I’m no better. Sure I recycle, I don’t even drive, but this old house we live in could never be described as ‘ecologically efficient’. I could do a lot more to help, but as the years have passed I’ve come to accept that what I remember is so drastically different from what the next can recall that soon a tree will be a surprise for the kids growing up these days.

I was on a plane recently, first time in years, I didn’t plant a tree, I didn’t carbon offset. But when I saw all those businessmen who use planes the way I used to use buses (get a bike), it kinda knocked me back for six. There is no great escape, no getaway. Next time you think you’ve managed to get away from the world, look up, that guy in the plane staring back, he’s thinking of putting a Starbucks franchise just where you’re standing.

The Great Escape

PRIVACY - Well this is a rather straight forward design, based on an old and tatty motel door sign. Simply called privacy, it hints at more than just the insane overcrowding and over-population of so many of our cities today, but the absolute lack of privacy, what could once have been called a human right, and now, well now I suppose it is considered something of a luxury.

Get rich, buy an island, but a pod on the Moon, no doubt you’ll still be spied on by a satellite for some dodgy reality show, I’m sure some TV executive can crowbar a mention of ‘Moonies’ just to add some frission to the whole idea. Maybe not.

The only thing I can say is don’t get famous, get rich, not famous. Fame certainly must suck. Sure some crazies need that much attention, but I doubt many want it for the rest of their lives.

There sure are a lot of trailer trash (to be succint) who’d love to be famous. If you live without privacy, in a trailer, with god knows how many people peering over your shoulder, it probably is a step up. Still no ‘me time’ but at least I’m rich.

It’s all back to my old argument, too many people on this planet. When the time is right and the money is available I guarantee they’ll be building tax-free casinos and health spas on the Moon. It’s quiet up there right now, cold dark and quiet. If only I didn’t need to breathe air and was restricted by the laws of gravity, sounds a great place for a vacation. In fact anywhere that the rest of you six billion busy people have failed to notice would do me, it’s nothing personal, it’s just we all need a break from our vastly extended primordial family - once in a while.

Perv - A t-shirt that speaks for itself! A friend spotted the original municipal sign in Switzerland and Germany. It seems that mixed toilets don’t work after all. If porn is the second most popular activity on the Net (Social Networking being the first - Check out The Mass Debating T-Shirt!) - then mixed toilets must be high up on the ’submitted by amateur’ lists. After all, we’ve heard of Happy Slapping, not such a happy event mind you, I can’t imagine when I’d be happy to be slapped, perhaps grateful under the right circumstances, but never happy.

Anyhoo, toilets, I do seem to keep coming back to toilets, I would like to blame it on Duchamp, who knows, perhaps I wasn’t properly toilet trained. I can’t stand the places, public ones stink, god knows how homosexuals put up with it when they are cottaging (is that a verb now?). To be honest, the gay guys I have met through the years can’t stand dirt, perhaps they could all chip in and just buy one instead. Have a dress code. No dirty boots etc.

In short, Europe must be rife with toileteers for this image to have ever come in to being. I can’t imagine the UK ever standing for mixed loos, or to be more precise ,British women. Let’s just say it isn’t just the perving that would put them off, it’s more of a toilet seat technicality.

Men in the UK are for the main part brought up to keep their head down and their gaze to their own, if a public loo smells don’t breathe, do your ones (and twos if you really have to) and get out sharpish.

Macho Macho

Ok, you may have guessed by now I’m not the hottest on blogging. I have around 45 MORE t-shirts to include on this blog and god knows when they will be done. Nevermind, at least I design great tees (if I do say so myself ;p).

So at last… the Medallion Man is back and kicking in this trompe l’oeil t-shirt I have created. I did cop out and leave it as pale t-shirts. Too many hairs to highlight for darker wear. However I think the image has overall come out really well, and the idea is slap bang in your face.

Men these days are pampering themselves to all sorts of beauty therapies. I don’t particularly like hairy bodies, but being a straight guy probs has something to do with that. Sure some men like a hairy minge, even armpits or legs, but I doubt any guy admires a hairy female chest. In general it’s a genetic odditiy, something imbalanced in the old hormone department. But guys with hairy chests?

I don’t have much hair on my chest, but I have some, if it was out of control and creeping up my neck or over the shoulders I’d think about getting something done. But hairs on the chest? Remember that old saying, ‘This’ll put hairs on ya chest’ ? Usually in remark to a particularly foul but strong bottle of booze, it didn’t, I mean put hairs on ya chest. But back then it must’ve been a sign of virility. In fact it still is - and that’s the problem.

In an over-sanitized, over-feminized race, the next pressure I will probably face is my ensuing baldness. I found it pretty depressing seeing it creep back, although I’ve been shaving my head for 10 years, I appreciated the stubble. If women hate hairs on the chest, they love them on the head, however short.

Basically women want men to not only behave, but even look like women. The fate of the human race relies on medical science and their next breakthrough.

An orgasm pill for women. End of man.

A baldness cure. Hoorah, man lives to fight another day.

Anyway did you see the golden ringpull? I thought it a nice tribute to David Jason’s cocoa tin lid medallion in the old British TV comedy ‘Open All Hours’.  My old dad wears a medallion, ok so it’s a St. Christopher’s pendant, and no he doesn’t leave his shirt open to the waist anymore. But I can faintly remember when he did and he wasn’t the only one. Every dad had a black shirt, hairy chest, and a medallion hanging for all to see.

None of it seemed to particularly entice the ladies at the time, sure they were all married, but a bit of parading about in the park was harmless enough. Still, even the hippy disco chicks way back when had already decided - hairy chests are out.

Barbie Queue

Another word play tee for the collection. In short, a comment on the whole Size Zero debate and the debacle that ensued. It seems that most of the media can’t come to terms with exactly how ordinary the world is. Sure there are a few soap ads featuring larger sized women, perhaps some other token efforts by savvy marketing gurus have made it through, but I haven’t seen any. Fashion is the worst culprit when it comes to presenting faked realities. If there’s one thing I know, if all women looked had today’s model figure, you can bet they have starved and exercised themselves half to death to achieve it. Women worry about their weight because the women they aspire to are younger, taller and thinner than they ever were..

Welcome! At last Retro God has its own blog, and I’ve a lot of work ahead of me. Let me introduce myself, I’m Paul Baines, a UK based fashion designer, and I am Retro God! OK, perhaps a bit presumptuous, but it caught your eye, or you wouldn’t be here. Now, I’m not your usual T-Shirt designer (god bless them, one and all ;p ) - I’m not a design snob - well, perhaps I am - but I do come from a very different background than your usual pick. Way back in the early 90’s I graduated with a Ba Hons in Conceptual Arts & Design.

Now you may ask what the hell is it? Good question, and one I’m still trying to answer myself. Take a peek at Marcel Duchamp, there’s a great start, work your way along the arts time-line, looking for the freaks and you’ll find yourself in Andy Warhol’s Factory. Keep going, there’s Jeff Koons, and hey how about chucking in Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin for good measure. They, however much they might deny it, are all conceptual artists. Right… so why fashion, why mass-made, why the on line store? Why not a gallery? Why not? It seems the greatest gallery system in the world is right here and it’s on line.

It’s my site, it’s yours, it’s every forum and blog out there. I was taught to artistically justify every idea, every action, every piece. I’m still doing it now. In fact, that’s just about the best reason to blog every design I’ve created. I am using the medium of kitsch, of mass production, to subvert social comment, to disable the enabler, inject discourse with street style philosophies, pour them back into the streets via fashion, thereby intensifying further debate on line.

A wonderful loop, something I’m fascinated by, the entropy of discourse. This may all seem very high and mighty for a lowly t-shirt designer, but in all honesty, I try to maintain a low-brow veneer for all my designs, this increases the effectiveness of the subversion.

Take a look at the designs and perhaps you’ll get a clearer idea of my overall line of inquiry. Using common sayings and urban myths, everyday people with unglamorous lives, utilitarian objects, word play and surrealist effect, to convey the current Zeitgeist of the most psychologically damaged culture in history.

Retro God is an experiment, a collision of fashion and art, a font of originality, a source for style, a politcal forum, a new and unique way of re-inventing street iconography, surrealism, social characture in to a clothing brand for those seeking a real alternative to ‘I’m With Stupid’ and ‘Kiss Me I’m Irish’ t-shirts.

We don’t license tees, every design here is an RG original. We take a low profit of just $1 per tee to make sure our clothing line is accessible to all! Check us out - prepared to be amazed - prepare to meet the God of Retro.

http://www.retrogod.com