Holland Homage. Pen and ink. Originally published in the Daily Pennsylvanian on October 18, 2007.
Fashion designer Henry Holland rose to fame with his 80-style graphic tees and campaigns featuring his muse, Agyness Deyn (the “It” model at the time). The t-shirts featured celebrity names and rhyming taglines (e.g., “Do me in the park, Marc [Jacobs]” or “I’ll tell you who’s boss, Kate Moss”) and quickly spawned several copycats.
Some of these “tributes” to Holland were featured on a Manila blog that I checked occasionally to keep abreast of what was going on in my hometown (see here and here for more deets).
I don’t think the trend caught on at Penn (campus fashion skewed more toward East Coast preppy for the guys and boho chic for the girls*), but it was interesting to envision which topical personalities would have been featured on the shirts had the fad spread.
On the shirts:
Amy Gutmann – UPenn president, academic, political theorist, and perennial recipient of “Women on Top” awards (She made frequent cameos in the work of the other opinion artists, with one cartoon memorably depicting her as Sue Storm — cheerleader-smile and all)
Irina Malinovskaya – Former Wharton undergrad who was charged with the murder of her ex-boyfriend’s girlfriend (!)
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – Iranian president who addressed a crowd at Columbia University earlier that fall and made headlines for his remarks on the 9/11 attacks, the Holocaust, and the LGBT community
Willis J. Stetson – UPenn’s long-standing Dean of Admissions who resigned a year before his expected departure amid silence from the university
The presentation was a bit irreverent, but if I got even one person to look more closely at the news headlines as a result, then my work was done.
This is a scan of the drawing as it appeared in the DP. More about my stint at the DP here.
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* The Goyard bag on the leftmost girl’s arm is something that I actually saw a lot of girls on campus toting around, though. All the references to handbags in my cartoons (from the Paddington to the Longchamp) reflected an obsession that seemed to have exploded in the last few years… and I was right. In retrospect, the noughties (2000-2009) has even been christened the decade of the “It Bag.” The good news is that we seem to have moved past that now…