We Reviewed All That Corbyn-Themed Streetwear

Hey, Corbyn, my main man, what’s the dilly-o daddy-o? Is it daddy-o or daddy zero? It should be zero, because you’re sub-zero temperature-wise, Mr Corbyn, you fucking cool motherfucker. Damn you’re cool! Which other politicians eat kebabs? Has Theresa May ever even looked at a kebab? Can’t see big Terry May asking for both chilli and garlic sauce on her lamb doner.

We know that Corbyn is the cool-guy candidate. He’s been endorsed by every grime MC with an F64 on SB:TV. He’s the chill bro with the beard and the bike. He supports Arsenal, which is – to be fair – distinctly uncool, but Americans think it’s cool, so it’s cool in a kind of abstract awful way. At least he supports A Team.

The students and burgeoning graphics designers have caught onto this, too, and now the Wavey Basement crew are combining their love of streetwear with their newfound love of progressive politics and their inherent love of taking money off idiots, and are making Corbyn-themed T-shirts with a cheeky sportswear twist. We are going to observe some of these socialist sartorial pieces and judge them; judge them very hard indeed.

Shall we get started, comrades?

CORBYN NIKE – £20

It’s probably best to say right off the bat that almost all of these kinds of T-shirts owe their entire existence to Sports Banger, to the point where I think Mr Jonny Banger should be getting a cut each time someone puts a funny word above a Nike swoosh. This shirt is produced by Bristol Street Wear, and Bristol is the exact sort of place you can imagine someone wearing one of these, because it’s full of skatery stoner street artists who don’t know what it feels like to not be earnest 24/7. Design-wise, it’s just a little unimaginative; it doesn’t really seem to mean anything. It’s the Beavis and Butthead of T-shirts – a nonsensical chuckle for whoever sees it, then a furrowed brow of confusion, then forgetting it ever existed.

CORBYN ATHLETIC – SOLD OUT

This one is a bit more aesthetically pleasing, plus the font is such that from a distance you might not be able to make out it says “Corbyn”, thus saving you the embarrassment of wearing a politician’s name on your body. It’s also modelled on the Champion logo, which at least has a kind of nudge-wink element to their belief of Corbyn as “the boy” and an endorsement of him as a strong leader willing to take this country back to where it always should have stayed: being ruled by the Romans.

GRIME 4 CORBYN – £20

This is not a good novelty politics T-shirt. I mean, none of them are “good”, but this one is especially offensive. It says Grime 4 Corbyn on it but there’s no grime association anywhere to be seen. Maybe the hashtag? Grime … artists… use them to… promote their… music and politics? Everything about it is wet. You can imagine some dickhead who eats Sunday pub roasts wearing this, with his ale-gut hanging out the bottom of it, trying to tell some poor young girl about how much he loves Tinchy Stryder. Ultimately, the most offensive part of this T-shirt isn’t the shirt itself; it’s who would potentially wear it.

JEREMY CORBYN DOUBLE BOX LOGO – £10

I mean, pretty clear what the lads down at THTC are trying to do with this one. It’s also pretty clear that they’re fucking it up completely. There are two Supreme-style box logos on this, one with “Jeremy” and one with “Corbyn”. They’re the wrong size. They’re the wrong font. There are two of them. It looks like a bootleg from a particularly blind market stall seller who had the design described to him via smoke signals.

Still, for only a tenner, can’t really argue with it, can you?

@joe_bish

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