During that time I didn't have much money, so buying things for myself online was a commitment. I got it from a website called CafePress who was one of the only websites that priced custom shirts back in the mid 2000s. They have a very easy to use interface and ordering scheme. The other nice aspect is that they were fairly lenient on copyright infringement.Well, from my experience if you add a design, and then have it printed relatively immediately they'll just make it and ship it to you, rather then banning it from the site. I put this design together around the same time as the "Rad is Rad" and "P!" shirt. I still have it in my "workspace" or whatever so I could order another one if I wanted to.
I may indeed order another in the future because this one has become old and dirty. After many wears and washes the text looks great -yet a bit faded-. I believe that when they made this shirt they printed out something like a transparent iron on. You can just barely see where they cut out the square shape where all of the text lies or the image on the back. The stains and yellowing seem to persist on the heat pressed areas though, as if they attract or absorb colors well. I chose gray fabric because it was the darkest that they would go at the time -if I got it reprinted I would make it white text on black-. And of course I chose a medium, that still fits now -which is some feat of growth (or lack thereof)-.
The idea came to me as my friends and I were watching American Psycho. There's an awesome scene where Christian Bale make a reference to the Huey Lewis and the News song "It's Hip to be Square". We wanted to have some shirts which referenced this scene and because the movie was obscure it was nearly impossible to get merchandise. We started brainstorming concepts and this one-off seemed like an obvious idea. On the front it has the words "It's Hip to be" in the traditional FINAL FANTASY font and then "Square" from the original "Squaresoft" logo. CafePress has an option to put images or text on the back of the shirt for a few extra dollars, so for all of the designs I made I felt obliged to put Something on the back. In this case I thought that the "moogle" from the box of FINAL FANTASY III on Super Nintendo was iconic for the series, so I slapped it on the back -it's just faded now-.
As you now know, there are actually three references for this design: Hewy Lewis and the News, American Psycho, and FINAL FANTASY/Squaresoft. I would assume that most people would get the Squaresoft reference even though they're no longer called that -it's Square Enix now-. Hip people probably get the Hewy Lewis call out but I'd assume that only my friends would appreciate the long-shot American Psycho nod.
I've had this shirt for a long time and had a whole bunch of people notice it. When I first started wearing it I simply enjoyed the extreme amount of geekery that a Squaresoft shirt offered. At art school most got the references and there was a lot of custom apparel and flying around so people were pretty tuned in. It was almost a dream to be able to wear this when working at Square Enix and the icing on the cake was people thinking it was cool. I'm pretty stoked because now when people recognize its age they think I've had it since Squaresoft existed and that it may even have been official. If nothing else, this has caused a great deal of "Which FINAL FANTASY is your favorite?" discussions/arguments.
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