The graphic is a butter stick, seen flat: a pale yellow rectangle with a wrapper band, and down the band, in blue capitals, the words SALTED BUTTER. The lettering runs vertically, as it does on a real quarter-pound stick when you hold it in your hand and read the side. The blue is the blue of supermarket packaging, not the blue of Delft. The yellow is the yellow of a kitchen wall in February. Nothing else is printed. No cow, no churn, no dairy-maid. Just the object and its name, enlarged to the width of a human chest.
I keep looking at the word salted. It is doing more work than the drawing. A butter stick wrapper has to tell you which butter you are holding, because the unsalted stick looks identical in the dark of a refrigerator. The salt is the only difference that matters at the moment of use, and the wrapper is the only place that difference is announced. The shirt takes that announcement and makes it the whole garment. You are not wearing a butter costume. You are wearing the label that tells the cook which butter this is.
That is the joke, and it is a quiet one. Most food costumes dress the body as the food: a banana, a hot dog, a slice of pizza. This one dresses the body as the packaging. The distinction is small but it changes what the wearer is doing. A banana costume says I am a banana. A butter-wrapper shirt says I am the information on the outside of the butter. It is a costume for people who read labels, which is to say, for cooks.
The choice of salted over unsalted is not arbitrary. Unsalted butter is the professional’s default, the one you buy when you want to control the salt yourself. Salted butter is the table butter, the one that goes on bread, the one that sits in a dish and gets soft. It is the more social of the two. To print salted in blue capitals is to declare a position in a long domestic argument, and to do it without saying a word. The shirt is not neutral. It has taken the side of the butter that is ready to eat.
I have no idea whether the wearer has ever churned butter or stood in a dairy. The shirt does not require it. What it requires is that you recognize the wrapper, and that you find something funny in the gap between a quarter-pound stick and a human torso. The humor is in the scale. A butter stick is small enough to hold in one hand. The graphic blows it up until the lettering runs from collarbone to hem. The object has been promoted to a body.
There is a second gap, between the wrapper and the shirt itself. A real wrapper is paper or foil, printed in registration, folded around a measured block. The shirt is cloth, and the graphic is a picture of the wrapper rather than the wrapper. The blue letters do not tell you anything about the fabric. They tell you what the design is pretending to be. This is the ordinary condition of a printed costume: it borrows the authority of a label without any of the label’s obligations. No weight, no ingredients, no sell-by date. Only the word salted, repeated down the front.
I find that I prefer it to a more elaborate butter costume. A full stick suit, with corners and a foil twist, would be a mascot. This is a citation. It points at the object and lets you do the rest. The blue capitals are the same blue as the salt box in a northern kitchen, the one that sits by the stove and gets a little damp in August. The yellow is the same yellow as the butter dish on a Sunday table. The shirt does not reproduce those things. It quotes them.
If you are looking for the salted butter shirt, the design is the one described above: a butter-stick wrapper with vertical blue SALTED BUTTER lettering. It says salted, not unsalted. That is the whole of it. The rest is what you bring to the reading.
Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.