Teed Off Willamette Week

By Alisa Richter

These days, the ultimate fashion statement is to wear your politics on your sleeve. Or, in this case of Urban Outfitters, your apathy on your chest.

The hipster-couture clothier to the masses is peddling a $28 mock-vintage T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan, "Voting is for old people."

The message has drawn fire from a variety of groups, including the Oregon Bus Project, a youth-oriented political group that has a two-word response silk-screened on a T-shirt of its own:"Vote, F*CKER."

Bus Project chair Jefferson Smith will present the shirt to merchandise buyers at the Urban Outfitters outpost on Northwest 23rd Avenue this Thursday, and the group is trying to coordinate a delivery to the retailer's corporate headquarters in Philadelphia at the same time. "It's every bit as inappropriate and ridiculous," he says, "but it works."

Urban Outfitters honchos aren't talking but issued a press release stating that they had "no interest in discouraging young people from voting." In fact, they say, the T-shirt is emblematic of "the rift between politicians and their platforms and the growing concerns of young people in this country."

The mastermind behind the "old people" slogan, 25-year-old Yale grad John Keddie, originally designed the shirt for his online retail site, VintageVantage.com (where it sold for $18). He says critics are overreacting to what he thought was a funny line. "I don't think they're giving the youth any credit by assuming they will take instructions from a T-shirt," he says.

Smith gets the joke, but says innocuous pop-culture byproducts have broader social implications. "Impropriety can be fun," he says, "but messages like these push the world in the wrong direction, and we have to push back."

"Messages like these are just a bad attempt to be edgy by playing up destructive stereotypes," says Annie Stewart, campus organizer for the New Voters Project, another Oregon group. "This is the first time in history young voters can have a significant impact on the election outcome, and [Urban Outfifters] is telling them their voice doesn't matter."

John Wykoff, executive director of the Oregon Student Association, agrees: "There are better ways to get your message out without trashing voting, or old people."