Cultural Learnings is collaborating with PURVEYR on their inaugural Insight Paper, examining the impact of t-shirts on the Filipino creative industries. It seeks to understand consumer behaviours around t-shirts in the country, including spending habits, motivations, and influences. If you are based in the Philippines, share your knowledge and be a part of the research by answering this survey.
During the fall of 2019, when I was still living in Oxford, I learned how to grow my own mushrooms indoors.
I used a relatively easy cultivation method, requiring equipment that was accessible from my local appliance store. It took three years and three tries to finally reach the stage of “fruiting,” or seeing tiny heads pinning on the white mycelium. It felt more than just hyphal knots forming to create baby mushrooms. An idea, planted years ago, was finally sprouting into a fruit.
What difference a day makes.
One afternoon, over the phone, I told my friend Kat about this exciting development. I explained to her my step-by-step process: how I made my own substrate, put it in sterilised jars, and inoculated it with mushroom spores. It took about two weeks for the mycelium to colonise the substrate — the stage in which the cakes would be “birthed,” transferred into the fruiting chamber, and misted with water twice a day.
As if caught between the whirlwind of mycology lingo, Kat asked me how I knew my mushrooms were doing alright. I answered her plain and simply.
“If you feel good, the mushrooms will feel good too.”
Left: Edgar Wallace, former head chef of Koya Bar, London; Right: Dr Johnny Drain, food designer and fermentation expert.
A paused lingered, followed by a chuckle and an epiphany. During this period, Kat and I were firing ideas for Edsa, our then-new project on food and creativity. On the phone, she suggested we plaster this phrase onto a sweatshirt and sell it. This double meaning was reminiscent of the Filipino humour we missed while living abroad and something we wanted to communicate as Edsa. The phrase struck the perfect balance of intellect and innuendo — enough to make you think twice, like combining ingredients to create a dish or marrying one brilliant idea with another. We connected the dots when one of her friends was organising a mushroom and fungi festival in London — an opportunity for Edsa to make its debut.
Left: Our makeshift photography studio; Right: Our stall at Fungi Fest in Hoxton Docks, London.
So, we moved quickly. We pooled whatever capital we could muster and turned the project around in a month, printing 100 sweatshirts. For the look book, we created a DIY photography studio at home by hanging fabric over a curtain rod and using household items as props. Friends donned our sweatshirts while they told us about the things that made them feel good. At the festival, we met people of all sorts: scientists, designers, chefs, foragers – the list goes on. We learned a lot about how consumers think during that one afternoon: how our forest green sweatshirts evoked the pastoral life and sand beige was quintessentially Hackney Wick. Whether people tended to stain their clothes or preferred oversized cuts were big deciding factors, too.
However, what was most interesting to learn was the ways our sweatshirts resonated with people – that it reminded them of a trip they took with a friend or a delicious mushroom dish from yesteryear. As guests entered the auditorium, their heads turned to our bright yellow display. Eyes scanned the sweatshirt. A pause lingered, followed by a chuckle and an epiphany.
Like sweatshirts, I suppose that is what is in a t-shirt. It is more than just a garment that has passed through the eyes and hands of many before reaching yours. It is a medium for a message – like what canvas is to a painter or paper to a writer. A millennial calling card. An idea finally sprouting into a fruit.
Good things
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If you live in the Philippines, please share your knowledge and be a part of PURVEYR’s inaugural Insight Paper by answering this survey. The data will be used to produce a report on the impact of t-shirts on the Filipino creative industries.