Screamer of the Week: The Scrambled Signal Shirt

Hieu Tran is an occasional contributing writer to Ten Pretty Girls, freelancing and living in San Francisco. Anyone with eyes can see that there is something seriously wrong with today's Screamer, but Hieu explains to us with scientific precision exactly what that is.

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Yes, pictures do speak a thousand words. So that should save me a lot of work writing about this exemplary screamer of the week. But it doesn’t hurt to add a few more words either when it comes to this men’s polo shirt.

I am no fashion designer, I will readily admit, but my right to hurl vitriol at this piece comes from the same right that a movie-goer has to verbally pound Uwe Boll even though that movie-goer has never directed a movie. Simply put, it’s not whether we’ve accomplished a feat that gives us our right to criticize someone else’s attempt at the feat, but whether we’ve seen better. And upon seeing this shirt, oh yes, we have seen better.

One has to wonder what the designers were thinking when they laid down the color pattern. Froot Loops? Eternal virgin? Men’s polo shirt for the blind? What adjectives were running through their minds? Handsome? Refined? Classy? Fun? Babe magnet? Cute? Hot? Acceptable?

Is it even acceptable? How can one even attempt to ascribe any positive descriptions to that shirt without laughing? Sort of like corporate espionage and sabotage, someone from an enemy company had slunk into The American Living’s design department and had managed to achieve the equivalent of uploading a devastating virus into their mainframe.

But let’s look at this from an aesthetic point of view, because it’s one thing to scream at men’s polo shirts based on a visceral reaction, but it’s much more sophisticated of us to scream from an analytical perspective. Simply put, our eyes are not trained to look at this shirt. It’s kind of like how when an analog TV set would scramble its signal, and we get that wobbly, dizzying, pan-colored smear on the screen. Has anyone ever seen that and whispered softly and contently to oneself, “This is a good channel”? No. Chances are we would try to change the channel.

Our eyes, inundated today with violent movies, extreme porn, and strange YouTube videos, are as capable of looking at this shirt as they are at staring into the sun for five straight hours. Too many stripes fill out the pattern block. If they had designed a block of green, blue, and red, then repeated that block, then we could nod and say, “Okay, I can see how that works. My eyes are not burning, and this shirt is acceptable.”

But we can see that on this shirt, the collar starts off with blue, followed by orange, then green, etc. In order to know when the pattern repeats, we must find the next time blue is followed by orange, followed by green, etc. That would be somewhere about the stomach area. So, in between the collar and the stomach area of this shirt, we have strange, unseductive chaos stabbing seven colors into our eyes. We cannot sense any order on that shirt, so we feel disturbed.

Of course, this shirt is not without its merits. It has two sleeves, ribbed cuffs, an embroidered chest logo; it is made of soft cotton and has side vents. In its most basic function as a men’s polo shirt, to clothe the human torso, it does its job sufficiently. The only drawback is that looking at it makes us want to change the channel.