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Fashion for Good: The World’s Most Expensive T-Shirt


7 November 2011 at 11:10 am
Staff Reporter
A unique fundraising initiative where people purchase t-shirts which depict an item of aid that their purchase has paid for, hopes to deliver much needed relief to children caught in the worsening humanitarian disaster in Africa.


Staff Reporter | 7 November 2011 at 11:10 am


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Fashion for Good: The World’s Most Expensive T-Shirt
7 November 2011 at 11:10 am

A unique fundraising initiative where people purchase t-shirts which depict an item of aid that their purchase has paid for, hopes to deliver much needed relief to children caught in the worsening humanitarian disaster in Africa.

UNICEF – the United Nations Children’s Fund – has teamed up with t-shirt company Threadless, advertising agency BBH New York and artist collective Christine and Justin Gignac to launch ‘Good Shirts’ – a clothing line that blends philanthropy and fashion.

Good Shirts are t-shirts printed with an item of aid that is needed to fight famine in Africa – with each shirt sold at the exact cost of the aid item depicted. 100% of the proceeds go to the U.S. Fund for UNICEF, to supports its work with children.
 

Above: The UNICEF shirts range in price from $18.57 to $300,000.

New York based artist Justin Gignac – who along with wife Christine designed the t-shirts – says “There’s a huge humanitarian crisis going on there right now – there are 12 million people in need of humanitarian assistance including 4 million children”.

UNICEF says the situation in the Horn of Africa is more than just a food crisis – it is a crisis for child survival. “Unlike earthquakes and tsunamis, droughts are humanitarian dramas that unfold slowly – and children are the most at risk.”

Gignac says they chose a basic, iconic style that really put the focus on the concept, rather than the execution – “we could do these beautifully realistic – but then people would be buying ones based on how well they are painted. But we wanted people to buy them strictly based on the idea.”

The t-shirts range from $18.57 for a t-shirt which features a mosquito – which funds three insecticide treated mosquito nets – up to a $300,000 t-shirt which features a cargo plane – which funds a provide a charter flight to transport aid from the UNICEF supply warehouse in Copenhagen to Nairobi, Kenya

Other designs include a syringe (measles vaccine – $24.24), a bucket of water (family water kit – $125.55) and a truck pulling a giant cob of corn (100 tonnes of emergency food corn soy blend – $75,000).

Gignac says the he believes the cargo plane t-shirt could be a record breaker, “We are going to check with Guinness (book of records), but I think we have the world’s most expensive t-shirt”.

Ari Weiss, Executive Creative Director at BBH NY, said the project lets people wear their donation as a source of pride and as a means to spread the word – if friends get a little competitive over who’s being more altruistic, all the better.

Good Shirts for the Horn of Africa from Threadless.com on Vimeo.

For more information, or to purchase a t-shirt, visit www.threadless.com/UNICEF




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