T-Shirts for Vecona Vintage

Most of you already know I am friends with the people behind the label Vecona Vintage. They asked me to design some T-Shirts aiming at Lindy Hop Dancers. So I took two popular songs and made them into shirt motives. "Straighten up and fly right" for an Aviatrix motive à la Amelia Earhart (even if the lyrics go quite differently) and the chorus of the "Tiger Rag" with some 1930s collegiate figures!

Get them at www.vecona-vintage.com

Apache Gals

To understand the titel you might want to read more about Apache Dance. The name derieved from early 20th century parisian street gangs that were famous for their cruelty but also for their unique style. They appear to have been quite peacock-ish with their outfits.

The famous dance includes a fight between a gangster (or pimp) and a prostitute and became part of the popular culture of the first half of the 20th century. If you do a search on youtube you will find many movies with it ranging from comedies and musicals to crime flics. While I love the style of the costumes and the dance moves I felt uncomfortable with the violence against women thing. I decided to give it a twist and let the women fight back. Their attitude resembles Riot Grrl comics like "Tank Girl" now.

Yes, it still includes violence but if society still blames the victims of sexism if the don't defend themselves... well the guys were "asking for it", right?

Die Groszstadt - Part II

Maybe you can see it is also a tribute to George Grosz (1893-1959) hence the spelling in the original title. It doesn't translate too well into english because we have this funny "ß". George Grosz changed the spelling from Groß into Grosz because he wanted to let it appear less german and more international. Same with John Heartfield who was born as Helmut Herzfeld. I did just read that a possible translation for Kremers could be Chandler....but then again: What would Raymond do?