The image itself seems to be a Bolex 8 mm camera, looking forward but away from a central facing observer, with a reel coming of the bottom of it that reads “Almost Famous”. On the label it’s shown that it’s part of Bershka’s “Authentic Handmaker” collection and the bottom of the shirt identifies it as the one of the last items in a limited collection “4 of 5”. 

This participation becomes evident once one steps away from the shirt and looks around and sees a pile of shirts on top of another pile of shirts. The myriad of vintage retro images is so abundant that whatever nostalgic or ironic meaning they could have had gets lost in the deafening, numbing variety of choice. This choice has become meaningless; choosing a shirt over another stops being an individual choice and becomes a predictable outcome. Once one realizes this store is the same as the Berhska in  Mexico and in Spain and in London and elsewhere, one realizes that what once was a clever pun or ironic juxtaposition becomes a meaningless byproduct of consumerism.

The overlapping of a globalized common knowledge and a romanticized past is epitomized in a second shirt. This image shows a digital form of media, a QR code, with a caption that reads secret message. Common knowledge will lead most viewers to assume this secret message can be unlocked with a smartphone or a tablet when in reality, divergent thinking will allow the observer to see it’s actual letters hidden between the pixels that make up the message. One can assume the idea behind this is that the wearer will feel clever by understanding the joke, by understanding that most people will be too blinded by their automated digital response to discern the analogue message.