$12 teextile: Purple Haze

A tribute done right, today's tee is a smokey tokey purple haze Jimi Hendrix design by What. Good tones here, good placement, good song. An overall win, if you're into this sorta thing.

Lately things just don't seem the same...but uh, go buy this shirt.



Something's happenin, something's happenin...at teextile tonight.

Creative Contributions From Around The Globe

Hi everyone!

As you know the T-shirt contest has drawn to a close... the flood of submissions has ceased, the image pool has trickled dry, and the hyperactive discussion boards have reached a steady calm. What remains from this once-bustling group , is a great wall of creative contributions, of diversity and inspiration.

Several weeks ago, when this contest began, we didn't quite know what to expect. We planted the seeds, left a few guiding tools, and then stepped back to observe. What we saw was absolutely beautiful. In a blink of an eye, a community of thousands from all around the world, separated by vast oceans and stretches of land, had assembled here with a common purpose. The "competitive" landscape, was quickly repaved into one of support and camaraderie. Everyone worked together as a team, providing constructive feedbacks and willingly offering their help throughout each step. The unique aspect of this contest was that the pool of submissions was open for public viewing, which encouraged designers to engage more closely with and gain inspiration from each other's work. Distant and disconnected members soon found themselves in the company of friends, where strong bonds were beginning to form.

The wall of art that you see here, represents countless hours of hard work from designers, ranging from amateurs to professionals, who dedicated their time and creative efforts in support of Firefox. We were absolutely thrilled with the level of interest and talent that came through, and thoroughly enjoyed witnessing the evolution of the group over time.

We received over 2,000 submissions, and created a growing community of over 3,500 members on the Flickr contest group -- thats amazing! Our team here at Mozilla tackled the challenging task of picking the top 5 which were then passed off to the community for a final decision. Garnering the overwhelming majority of the votes, was the "lineup" design by Tracie Andrews from the UK which illustrated the global community through universal symbols of women and men with a clever integration of the fox among them. The runners up were Kevin Weagle, Ali Riyaz, Mathew Anderson, and Brett Rex Cannell. Please join me once again in congratulating the winners! I also wanted to give a special thanks to you, to everyone that contributed and helped in shaping this effort into the success that it became.

The winning design is currently in print production as the official Firefox 3 T-shirt, and scheduled to arrive in the Mozilla Stores within the next few weeks! Tracie was among our top designers and we're very excited to have her design featured in our Store.

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So what's next? We're definitely not saying goodbyes! In fact the wide array of creative talent has inspired us into launching a whole new project to help embrace and promote the many other great submissions that we've received. Our vision is to "open-source" these designs so that they can be available for print and released into the wild. There are a lot of legal hurdles we must overcome first, but we are working hard and excited to make this happen!

We'd love to keep in touch with you and maintain this global community of designers that have stepped up and connected with us. So please make sure to stick around and check back on the Flickr group and the Spreadfirefox.com homepage for updates. I will keep you all posted and pass along the latest news.

Below is an image-collage representing the broad spectrum of designs...a mere slice, a sample of what was submitted to us by you. A great wall of creative contributions from around the world... all in support of Firefox!

This was truly an amazing experience. Great job everyone, and thanks again!

Designer Defends Nipple Tassels on Tot T-Shirt

It's not a wardrobe malfunction.

Suzi Warren intentionally put nipple tassels on shirts for infants and preschool girls.

Warren is the owner and designer of Twisted Twee, a London clothing company some people find twisted indeed. The tasseled top has been causing a controversial buzz on the blogosphere.

Twisted Twee also offers clothes for babies and preschoolers that proclaim, "I've done f--k all day" (minus the dashes). Then there are alphabet shirts that announce that B is for Beer, C is for Condom and X is apparently for a pig having sexual relations with a duck.

Warren talked to ParentDish exclusively last night, via email, from her vacation in Spain, to explain her design:

"The Nipple Tassel t-shirt was designed as a response to my own distaste at seeing mini versions of sexy clothes on young children," she wrote. "Five-year-olds wearing slashed mini skirts and boob tubes, little thumb-sucking Britneys.

"There is nothing very sexy about a baggy, lap neck, long sleeved t- shirt for a 6-month-old. So by embellishing this style of garment with printed nipple tassels, the result is not that the baby becomes sexualized by the tassels, but that the tassels are made benign and silly by the baby. In fact the more inert, innocent and unaware the infant is, the more ludicrous the contrast becomes."

Tasseled tots might fall under what University of Iowa journalism professor Meenakshi Gigi Durham calls "The Lolita Effect" in her book of the same name, which examines the pressure on increasingly younger girls to be presented as objects of sexual desire.

Durham said a survey last year by Girlguiding, a British Girl Scout organization, concluded that girls as young as 10 feel intense pressure to conform to social pressure to look and behave seductively.

We asked Warren to respond:

"I totally agree with critics who feel that young girls are put under
enormous pressure by the media, the fashion industry and the content
of many TV programs, to be aware of their appearance, and then
dissatisfied with it," she added. "The trap set to ensnare girls into a life-time
of preoccupation with their looks is a subtle one.

"My garments are not part of this trap because they are about a subtle as a blinking brick and are aimed at parents of children too young to read or speak.

"If you are wondering who would be heartless enough to put their tiny
daughters in Nipple Tassel t-shirts, it is often their grandparents
who think the design 'cheerful.' Or the parents of boys who think the
whole gender bender things a bit of a hoot.

"Most of Twisted Twee's t-shirt designs are a response to some baffling
thing or other our daughter Betty has done, and celebrate the
befuddlement of parenthood and the idiocy of life. We call the things
we make pieces of Object D'aft. That is what the Nipple Tassel t-shirt
is. A bit of lunacy."

Okay, our final question to Warren: Say I bought one for my six-month-old baby, and I had a 10-year-old child as well. What message do you think it would send to that older child?

"I guess my answer would simply be if you have doubts about it, don't buy it," she wrote. "Your daughter is probably smart enough, self confident enough and relaxed enough to share the irony, but maybe she'd hate it and become very angry about it and that's probably not a bad thing either. Dressing a baby probably shouldn't be laden with social significance."