Tom Was Everyone’s First Friend

There was a time before Facebook. Modems still wheezed through handshakes, websites were called homepages, screen resolutions hovered just above a potato, and the phone line was tied up the entire time you were online. Dial-up. Per minute. That era.

Back then, everyone had the same friend. Me, my various emotionally unstable online acquaintances from whatever chat room I was haunting that week, and your emo parents—who couldn’t decide whether to sob on the train platform or stare at their wrists and ended up just cracking open a cheap bottle of Jim Beam, putting on a Fall Out Boy record, and producing you instead. That friend was Tom. Tom from MySpace, grandfather of all social networks, whose grinning face appeared on every single friends page from here to Botswana without exception.

Italian label Sunnei has now put Tom’s legendary image on a t-shirt. It costs 160 euros. Tom Anderson, the man who was automatically added as your first-ever social media friend, immortalized on overpriced cotton for the nostalgia-industrial complex. If you’ve thought about him on cold winter nights—and you have, don’t lie—now you can wear him.