H&M and Primark accuse bored blogger of spying
Thursday, July 22nd, 2010
Bitterwallet has a friend called Joe Madden who for years has been silently enraged by the shitty designs on the front of T-shirts sold by most of the UK’s fashion retailers. His particular bugbear is the deployment of the meaningless logo, usually including the name of a place and/or a number or year.
You know the sort of thing – ‘N. Jersey Atlantic Docks 1990’, ‘Eagle Flame 2000’, ‘Santa Barbara 1976’. Then there’s ‘Casdia Reef Fishing Tour’, with Casdia Reef being an entirely made-up place. It’s enough to make you chew your own elbows clean off.
But Joe has decided that silent rage is no longer the answer and he’s gone public… with a blog, helpfully called Meaningless T-Shirts. In order to fill that blog with examples of the garments that infuriate him, he went on a shirt-snapping shop tour at the weekend. Yes, we know he should probably find something more constructive to do with his time but, like, whatever.
All was going well on his mission until Joe was accosted by a member of staff in H&M, who informed him that it was strictly forbidden to take photos, “because you could be working for another store, who might want to copy our designs.”
It’s tempting to argue that if Joe was in fact practicing industrial espionage, he’d be a little sneakier and take the T-shirts into a changing room before photographing them. Hell, if nicking the design of the ’22 Offense-Defense Full Contact Beach Patrol’ T-shirt was so important, he’d probably stump up the price of one and copy it back at the office.
Later on, in Primark, the same thing happened to Joe again. As he says: “…this time by a Primark floor manager who called over a jumbo-sized security guard to forcibly delete from my camera any photos taken inside their store.” No, really. This really happened, for crying out loud.
Joe goes on to imagine a secret agent filing his report, deep within the bowels of a typical clothing retailer’s HQ: “Yeah, I got the pics alright – nearly got collared in New Look, but I kept my cool. You ain’t gonna believe what Primark are up to. Brace yourself: they’ve got a sweatshirt that says 1982 Canoe Systems. We’re in real trouble. 1982! Why the hell didn’t we think of that? I want our entire team working on some 1982 designs, ASAfuckingP!”
But don’t worry readers, he’s still got pictures of over 50 shitty T-shirt designs to add to his blog, and he’ll happily receive any others you can send his way. In the meantime, the best thing we can all do is to boycott the purchase of crappy T-shirts with silly, pointless words and numbers emblazoned all over them.
What’s that? You already were boycotting them? Oh, okay. Keep it up troops.

H&M – that clothes chain you’ve probably seen on the High Street – has made a whole bunch of people angry. Is it a row erupting over sweatshops? Has it sparked white-knuckled fury over rubbish working conditions for the staff? Maybe it’s shitty customer service?



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