Blood on White Cotton

Petra Collins designed a white t-shirt for American Apparel: silk-screened graphic of a hairy vulva, menstrual blood, the words "Period Power." That’s the whole thing. And it generated more genuine controversy in fashion circles than whatever was happening on German model-competition television that week.

Collins—a Toronto-born photographer and artist who’d been building a following through the feminist art collective The Ardorous since her teens—had a gift for making the deliberately unremarkable feel transgressive purely by putting it somewhere visible. The shirt wasn’t trying to be beautiful. It was trying to be honest, which in fashion comes to almost the same provocation.

What interests me isn’t the content itself but the math of the scandal. American Apparel had spent years running ads that featured barely-dressed women in compromising positions without much public complaint. Put body hair and blood on a white tee and suddenly the city is on fire. The logic isn’t hard to follow: bodies as objects are fine, bodies as subjects are offensive. Collins clearly understood that, which is why the shirt worked as a statement even if you’d never actually wear it in public.

It sold for around twenty-five euros on the American Apparel site, available for men and women. I’d have bought it without much deliberation—partly as a solid conversation-starter, partly because anything that causes that particular type of person visible discomfort in a grocery store is probably doing useful cultural work.