TWEEDLE DEE sits at the top of the shirt in a heavy, distressed face. Beneath it, smaller and flatter: I’M WITH DUM. To the left of that second line, an arrow points off the garment entirely, toward whoever is standing beside the wearer. This is the Dee half of a pair. The Dum half, by the logic of the thing, points right. I have not seen the Dum half in the same frame, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. The design tells me what it needs me to know: one shirt is a sentence with a subject, and the other is the object of that sentence, and the arrow is the grammar that connects them.
What interests me is not the joke, which is old and serviceable, but the asymmetry built into it. The Dee shirt gets the name and the caption. The Dum shirt gets the punchline. If you have ever been the person in a couple costume who did not choose the costume, you already understand the mechanism. One half of the pair is the author. The other half is the material. The arrow makes that relationship visible, and it points away from the wearer, which is the most honest thing about it.
The composition is a caption looking for its picture
Read the shirt as a page. The top line is a title. The second line is a caption. The arrow is a pointer, and a pointer is an instruction: look over there. The design does not describe the wearer. It describes the wearer’s companion. The wearer is a signpost. This is a strange thing to put on a shirt, and it is the reason the shirt works as a costume rather than as a slogan. A slogan asserts something about the person wearing it. This asserts something about the person standing next to them.
The distressed lettering matters here. Clean type would read as a label, a name tag, a piece of merchandise. The worn edges read as something older, a sign that has been out in the weather. I am not going to claim the design is quoting a specific historical sign or a specific illustrator, because I do not have evidence for that, and the visual observation I do have is literal: two lines of text, one arrow, left-pointing. What I can say is that the wear and the weight of the type give the shirt the look of a placard, and a placard is a public object. It is meant to be read by strangers. That is the whole point of a group costume. You are not dressing for yourself. You are dressing for the room.
The arrow is the argument
An arrow is a small piece of rhetoric. It does not describe; it directs. On this shirt, the arrow points left, which means the design assumes a spatial arrangement: Dee on the right, Dum on the left, the two of you standing shoulder to shoulder so that the arrow lands on the correct person. Get the arrangement wrong and the shirt becomes a lie. Stand on the wrong side and you are pointing at a stranger. This is a costume with an installation requirement, and nobody tells you that when you buy it.
There is a darker reading available, and I think it is the right one. The arrow points away from the self. The shirt’s entire comic content is the claim that the interesting person is elsewhere. I’m with Dum is a sentence that diminishes its own speaker. That is the joke, and it is also a description of a certain kind of partnership, the kind where one person is the story and the other person is the person who arranges the story. The shirt is funny because it is a confession. It is a confession because it is accurate. The arrow does not point at the wearer. It never does.
What the pair costs, and who pays
Here is where I stop treating the shirt as a design problem and start treating it as a transaction. A paired costume is a small market with a built-in dependency. You cannot buy half a joke. The Dee shirt is only legible next to the Dum shirt, which means the seller is not really selling a garment; the seller is selling a unit of two, and the buyer who wants the joke has to buy both halves or recruit a second buyer. That is a tidy arrangement. It converts a single purchase into a coordinated purchase, and it converts a solo shopper into a couple, or a friend, or a person who will spend the evening explaining the shirt to strangers.
The Tweedle Dee I’m With Dum shirt is the half that carries the name. If you are shopping for the pair, this is the one you find first, because the search terms people use — tweedle dee and tweedle dum shirts — put Dee at the front of the sentence. The Dum half is the one you find second, if you find it at all. That ordering is not an accident of the design; it is an accident of language, and the market has organized itself around it. The named half gets the traffic. The punchline half gets the sale that was already going to happen.
I am not going to tell you the shirt is well made or badly made, because I have not worn it and I do not have a report on the fabric. What I can tell you is what the design asks of you: a second person, a correct side, and a willingness to be the straight line to someone else’s joke. That is a lot to ask of a t-shirt. It is also, for the price of a novelty garment, a fairly precise description of how a lot of partnerships actually run.
The turn
The thing I keep coming back to is the arrow. It is the only element on the shirt that is not text, and it is the only element that does any real work. The words are a caption. The arrow is the claim. It says: the meaning of this garment is not on this garment. You are wearing a pointer. You are wearing a sentence that ends somewhere else.
That is a strange and slightly sad thing to put on your chest for a Halloween party, and it is also the most honest piece of graphic design I have looked at this week. Most shirts assert. This one defers. If you are going to wear it, wear it on the correct side, and know that the joke is on the person who agreed to stand next to you. The arrow points left. Make sure someone is there.
Disclosure: this publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.