They Just Are

There’s a point where wearing your favorite TV show stops feeling like a statement and just feels like showing up as yourself. ELEVENPARIS and colette made a collection of Simpsons T-shirts, which is just what happens when something’s been around long enough that it doesn’t need defending. The show’s been on for over thirty years. The characters haven’t aged a day. They’re not cool or uncool anymore—they just are.

The design works because The Simpsons are fundamentally a design object. That yellow, the black outlines, that typeface. It’s been the same for decades, which is unusual. Most shows get updated, softened, made contemporary. The Simpsons just kept going exactly as they were. So when you see them on a shirt, it reads instantly. It doesn’t feel like you’re wearing a licensed product. It feels like something you’ve known your whole life.

I had Simpsons everything in the 90s. Backpack, T-shirt, pins on my jacket. Now I’d probably just grab a shirt if it was good, without needing it to mean something. The show got worse years ago, and I stopped watching. But you don’t forget those characters. You see them on a shirt and you’re back in that apartment, that year, that particular version of yourself you don’t really access anymore. The weird thing is they look exactly the same.