A T-shirt for every day of the year...

Getting Shirty

In some ways, 'A t-shirt for every day of the year' is a bit of a backlash against digital culture. Also known as '366 T-shirts', the project sees Oswestry creative, Neil Phillips, wearing a different t-shirt with a different slogan for each day of 2012.

It's part protest, part diary, part wry observation, part winge about life in recession- and Cameron-bitten Britain. 'Get me off the grid', 'Premiership footballers could fund the education system', 'Don't touch my head when I'm eating'. It also advocates life in the real world, less in the virtual world of Facebook, Twitter, etc. 'This is better than a blog', 'I'm having peanuts and toast', 'Twitter or T-shirts?'. Park the character you have created for the screen-bound, 24/7 connected e-universe. Pasting your view of life on t-shirts is a way of anchoring identity back in the physical world, complete with the blood, sweat, tears and bolognese stains of 9 to 5 life.

Rather than competing for air-time in the communication mash-up of the internet, Neil Phillips is sitting in 'Radio' café with a Single Estate Ceylon tea and a t-shirt under his coat saying, 'You're not in charge'. For all its bizarreness, '366 T-shirts' is a personal crutch, a 21st century comfort blanket, an off-the-peg mantra, keeping the wearer grounded, centred, sane.

But 366 T-shirts is not a wholesale rejection of digital culture. The project has a website (www.366tshirts.co.uk), designed by Oswestry's Tom Perry. At midnight, it automatically posts up, tweets and Facebooks the day's t-shirt with an explanation of the slogan. There's a t-shirt archive to review the 366 wardrobe so far. And there's a photo diary plotting the day-to-day story of the project and providing a cultural excursion of Oswestry, including web links to local music, arts and businesses.

Locality is an important part of 366 T-shirts. As you browse the web diary, you build a picture of a life in context - buying chips from Wot's Cookin, playing vinyl at the Ironworks' PVC night, inspecting frogspawn on Oswestry Racecourse. It could be an eccentric online shop window for Oswestry, a quirky marketing concept ('Oswes-T: let's start a conversation'), the type of curve-ball inspiration which towns may need to harness in pursuing Mary Portas' vision of high street revival. Well, probably not, but it's the sort of creative annex we need to explore in stretching the web around the challenges of local economies.

We should spend less time trying to make our mark on global, virtual culture, and more time adding value to real, local culture. This includes using IT and the web creatively. Then we can build a sense of identity, community and creative expression that will sustain the place where we live.

A man of few, often poorly selected words, Neil Phillips has, nevertheless, produced gems of observation on the human condition from the comfort of his own living room.

A couple of choice comments were made into t-shirts and worn as an 'in-joke', and more followed. These eight original T-shirts began to form a subtle sub-text to his life.

In June 2011, the joke took a leap forward, evolving into the bizarre suggestion to literally have 'a t-shirt for every day of the year'.

Ploughing the same comedic furrow as Karl Pilkington, '366 T-shirts' is the situationist comedy that will run and run - well, for a year at least.

Neil Phillips

After coming 'first in year and third in school' for house-points at the age of nine, Phillips has struggled to regain the same intellectual kudos - until possibly now. The release of satirical concept albums, 'Appendectomy' and 'Supermarket', however, has seen Phillips stumble into a creative niche where he is comfortable and well-stocked with Thin Arrowroot and Assam loose leaf tea - undoubtedly paving the way to '366 T-shirts'.

K. Clarke

Once found sitting in a cupboard in the sixth form common room during lunch-break, and having existed on a capsule wardrobe of 7 items of clothing since the economic downturn, Clarke has always been a reluctant human being. After years spent crafting technical articles about post-galvanised steel and the restriction of thermal cracking in modified concrete, '366 T-shirts' was an inevitable diversion.

Each new t-shirt of the day will be worn from 0.00 hours (midnight), simultaneously appearing on the website. It will also be shared via Twitter & Facebook during the day.

You can view T-shirts released to date on the website together with a brief explanation of each of the 'slogans'.

Leave a comment here, or join the debate on Twitter using hashtag #366T

What's next?

The project concludes with the 'A T-shirt for every day of the year' exhibition, when the complete body of 366 t-shirts will go on display in 3D space. Watch out for further details.

'A T-shirt for every day of the year', aka '366 T-shirts', is a live art project unfolding through 2012.

For each of the 366 days of 2012, Neil Phillips is wearing a different T-shirt with words 'cut and pasted' from personal and observed conversations.

Is it social commentary, insanity, an incitement to revolution, the self-portrait of an artistic mute, a pastiche in brushed cotton of 21st century living, the promotional campaign that failed to impress in the Fruit of the Loom boardroom? To borrow the catchphrase of 'uncelebrity', you decide.

Follow him daily on Twitter, Facebook and this website as he togs up and bares all.