A picture paints a thousand words

Rosie Wilson (centre) with members of Giant Triplets

There are as many screen-printed T shirts as there are people wearing them all holding particular sentimentality to its owners but these designs fade over time. However, Giant Triplets has found a way to help continue the story of these garments by giving them a new lease of life with designs. Assistant editor Benjamin Austin spoke with founder Rosie Lee Wilson to find out more.

What’s in a T shirt? There’s the obvious the material, the tag, the design on the front. But symbolically a T shirt can hold memories of events, people, and times of joy. Up and down the country people wear their shirts with a printed design on the front depicting a key moment in time.

Most recently the streets are filled with people adorning merchandise from the recently hyped Oasis reunion tour as people look to remember the occasion. It’s these shirts that we hold dear to our hearts, as we take them out and wear them over and over again, remind us of memories they bring.

But much like memories, these T shirts can fade over time, and though they will never truly lose their aura of what they represent the physical print could become a ghost of its former design.

What if however, you could take that shirt woven with memories and give it new ones. It would bring even greater meaning to it and extend its life further, all while preventing the need for more shirts being sold; that’s where Giant Triplet comes in.

Prologue

For the last eight years Rosie Lee Wilson and co-founder Maeve O’Brien have been working under that name at festivals and other social gathering spots to help reinvigorate old T shirts.

Rosie said: “We’re both obsessed with the storytelling of clothing and the history of expression through clothing.

“The T shirt is the biggest symbol of that so because we’re art students we were obsessed with it.

“We wanted to figure out a way we could intercept this cycle so instead of those old T shirts going into landfill, we could instead make something new with them and something with more history through reprinting it.

“We’ll take a shirt that has a print on it then we’ll create a design that goes over the old print. It is supposed to create happy accidents and interesting layers and becomes more interesting through telling this story.”

The pair met in the print rooms at the University of Arts London where, with help from their tutors, they hit it off, starting Giant Triplets from there.

Rosie continued: “The name is from a Martin Luther King quote where he talks about the giant triplets of society. We were very much at university and very conceptual with it.

“One of them is materialism and another is racism. We are implicit with waste and it’s the spoiling of environments we will never see so we tend to call that environmental racism.

“We are very aware of how many resources go into making a T shirt. I believe it’s 2700L of water goes into creating one.

“We wanted to talk and do as much as we could to create circular design so we could reuse things as and when we could.”

The main story

The group has since worked with multiple charities and events; most notably Greenpeace, Oxfam and Glastonbury, which it has been a part of since 2018.

Rosie said: “I come from a family that took me to Glastonbury every year so it was a natural progression to have a space there.

“Our first year we worked with their sustainability team where they tried to get people to take their tents home.

“We had an incentive where if you agreed to take your tent home, we’d print you a shirt and it was massively successful.

“We printed more than 1,000 shirts and that year saw a huge increase of people take away their tents.”

Fatboy Slim doing his own screen printing

Giant Triplets has been part of the Glastonbury landscape ever since and through its Greenpeace activation had the chance to work with Fatboy Slim where he printed his own shirt.

This year Giant Triplets had an activation with War Child where they took artwork from festival headliners The 1975 and either printed it on a new shirt, provided by collaborators Neutral, or print the design onto the preloved T shirts of festival goers.

The print was done using a design provided by the band’s in-house graphic designer, and produced with the water-based Permaset ink from Colormaker.

The stand was a huge success bringing in more than £6,000 for the charity.

At the time of the interview Rosie was setting up a new activation at this year’s Boomtown Festival but Giant Triplets has also been part of the Horniman Museum and a variety of art galleries.

Pre-loved shirt after being given new 1975 print

Rosie said: “We are fully transportable and can pop up anywhere. we’ve created our own custom, travel-sized carousel with wheels on the bottom. It’s just a two-arm press.

“We’ve done things that have been memorable, like with Adidas we did an activation with one of their environmental campaigns where they made some shoes out of ocean plastics so we sat nicely along that in their Soho flagship store.”

Epilogue

With every activation Giant Triplets likes to share the joys of screen printing often getting those who visit to print their own shirts.

Rosie said: “As people obsessed with print, we know it gives so much dopamine, and the anticipation you get from creating your own thing contributes to its storytelling. People are more excited to talk about something they made themselves and it continues the conversation.

“People are amazed and they love it. We have had so many hilarious interactions. We’ve had it a few times where we’ve lifted the screen and people have said ‘oh wow this is science’.

“I think there’s something in the ubiquitousness of a T shirt that gives people that spark when they realise ‘I can print my own’, and its eye-opening for them so it’s fun to see them visibly amazed. It’s that energy that inspires me to keep doing it.

Pre-loved shirt before given new print

“It is something we enjoy here. That feeling of collective joy and coming together to have these euphoric moments when you are suspended in a space where you feel part of a collective like a festival, which is why people love them and we love to be part of them.

“It combats that feeling of isolation we sometimes feel at home so it’s really great to be together, experiencing joy”.

So, to ask again what is in a T shirt? For such a common item of clothing it can hold so much. As Rosie, Maeve and the whole Giant Triplets family are proving, a T shirt can be the frame for self-expressions, the billboard to joyful memories, and the centre of conversation when expressing something you did yourself.

A story can be told in so many ways so why not start with a T shirt.