Talking with T-shirts

It's hard to say who's more likely to mouth off at school this fall: students or their T-shirts. Statement T-shirts -- also known as attitude tees -- have caught on with teens outfitting themselves for the classroom: "Too cool for school," boasts a guys' shirt from Urban Outfitters. "I'm not doing homework tonight," warns an Old Navy girls' top.

Plain T-shirts are dull, explained 13-year-old Kassie Quackenbush, in a "surf 85" top as she shopped recently at Gap Inc.'s Old Navy store at Metro Pointe in Costa Mesa, Calif. "When you're walking through the halls, you can read someone's shirt if you're bored," she said, fingering a $9 turquoise top that cajoled, "Oh bee-have."

Message-laden T-shirts aren't new, but they've caught fire this summer, a bright spot in a lackluster retail season.

While overall apparel sales rose 0.2 percent year-over-year through June, the most recent figures available, T-shirts sales jumped 16 percent, said Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst for NPD Group, a market research firm in Port Washington, N.Y. He predicted their sales would grow 20 percent in the back-to-school months of July and August.

"The T-shirt's really the statement piece for the season," he said.

One reason is that as clothing styles have become tamer, with khaki pants and button-down shirts almost as cool for school as they were in the 1980s, the shirts give teens a way to be a little edgy.

If your closet is full of the plaid skirts and crocheted ponchos every other freshman is wearing, you need a few proclamation tees to catch the eye.

"What can you get away with? That's the point," said Christy Glass Lowe, a managing director at USBX Advisory Services, a Los Angeles-based investment bank. Some get away with a lot, or think they can. Junior high and high school students are snapping up double-entendre tees. "The parents think it's innocent, but the kids at school think it's talking about something completely different," said a clerk at Old Navy who declined to give her name.

One Abercrombie & Fitch Co. offering, for example, says, "North Carolina, it's great to be on top." Jay Smith, a 21-year-old clerk at Streetz, a clothing store in Glendale Galleria, in Glendale, Calif., wore one that said, "Big Boys Handyman Service. You'll love what we do with our tools." Meaning? "It's all interpretation," he said.

Kerry Thompson, principal at Scott City High School, said there haven't been any real problems with the students wearing attitude T-shirts this year.

The school's handbook says that any apparel with inappropriate phrasing or pictures isn't allowed. Shirts with Co-ed Naked sayings or blatant advertising aren't allowed.

"If it's something that can be interpreted as such, then we ask them to change or give them a shirt to wear."

Thompson joked with students when school began that the shirts would say "I love my principal," but none have been printed yet.

Teenage boys, for the most part, continue to align themselves with sports such as surfing, skateboarding and BMX riding by collecting T-shirts bearing Southern California brands such as Volcom and Element.

"It's a message of, 'I belong and this is the kind of stuff I wear,'" said Tom Kennedy of Anaheim, Calif.-based Pacific Sunwear of California Inc.'s PacSun division.

T-shirts offer hope to retailers partly because they're generally less expensive than other items. In fact, message-bearing tees have become this year's loss leader: They pull in customers who may then buy something more expensive, said Ellen Tolley, spokeswoman for the National Retail Federation.

"A retailer would not be upset if somebody left with a $15 T-shirt and an $80 pair of jeans," Tolley said.

Not all graphic tees, as they're known in the industry, are cheap. At Abercrombie & Fitch, shirts reading, "Some squirrels have all the nuts" and "Trust Me I'm a Doctor," go for $24.50.

Last month, American Eagle Outfitters launched a promotion giving students who buy jeans with a graphic T-shirt or a hooded sweatshirt a free kit of iron-on letters. "We encourage customers to make a statement of their own," spokeswoman Emily Leon said.

This might not be the best news for schools that have struggled with dress guidelines as students strolled onto campus wearing mini-skirts, precariously low-slung jeans, belly-baring tops and even bedroom slippers. T-shirts would be hard to regulate, the retail association's Tolley said.

"It's not easy for a school to say you can't wear a T-shirt that says one thing but you can wear T-shirts that say another," she said. "It's so subjective."

Frank Ellis, principal at Central Middle School in Cape Girardeau, said most of his students haven't yet gained an interest in the "attitude tees," but dress-code policy requires them to change if they wear any inappropriate clothing.

"We talk to them at the beginning of school, and that combats a lot of it," Ellis said.

Most of the shirts Ellis has seen aren't demeaning or suggestive, and that's partly because the students are still fairly young and somewhat innocent.

"If it's anything derogatory about school or about sex, then we'd have a problem with that," he said. Dress code requires that the students' clothing not be disruptive in the classroom.

Schools have become stricter in recent years about what they will and won't accept, said Aubie Goldenberg, a retail expert at Ernst & Young's in Los Angeles. And an inappropriately worded T-shirt would probably land on the no-no list.

"As students take liberties," he said, "the schools will push back."

Features editor Laura Johnston contributed to this report.