Everyone remembers being stuck in the classroom in September, staring out the classroom window as your head filled with the words of a mewling Blasket Islander. It's a classic memory, and in my school, one boy froze it in time by screen-printing it. He made 100 Peig T-shirts, which were worn with pride by everyone in our year. Talk about capturing the zeitgeist; these Tshirts were cool, because of their limited availability, and because they were emblematic of our teen-pain.
Had my friend had the resources, it's possible that every 17-year-old kid in Ireland could now be wearing one of his creations. Although it was a great joke, his cottage industry died that summer. But with the development of the web, his humour could now be wandering far and wide.
The Internet has not been as successful in fashion e-tail - as the spectacular failure of Boo.com illustrates - as in other industries. Perhaps it's because it's hard to see how something as impersonal as the World Wide Web can help you buy something as personal as something to wear.
Logic dictates that there's no point in buying Nike clothes on the Internet and then wait 10 days for them to arrive, when your local sports shop stocks them in abundance for you to touch and feel.
If, however, you don't want to wear Nike, the Web might be the place for you, because canny shopping online means that you needn't be a clotheshorse for a large multinational. If you're looking for something you remember fondly, or thought you'd never find, your search is over - the Web is a dreamland for obscurists.
A specific example is required, and they don't come much more specific than Willie Nelson's Tshirts. In some of Nelson's publicity shots, he's wearing a "Don't mess with Texas" T-shirt, which reflects perfectly the good-natured arrogance of the lone star state, but also promotes a legendary anti-litter campaign.
This teeshirt is available for $25 at texasworkwear.com, or guitars-cadillacs.com, where you can buy work-wear, string ties and other relics from the set of television series, The Dukes of Hazard. Elsewhere on the Internet, you can buy anything, from canary yellow leisure suits to Oxford bags. Think of the guy in Amsterdam who searched, half-jokingly for titi+camara+tee+shirts on the internet and imagine his surprise when he found a T-shirt with the little-known Liverpool footballer on the front. Where there's a demand, however small, there seems to be a supply online.
The man behind the Titi Camara shirt is Dubliner Luke McManus (a self-confessed novice in the design racket), who recently started nutmeg clothing (www.nutmegclothing.com), a Tshirt label "celebrating individuals" with business partner Joe Collins. The first in the range features an image of striker Camara with the words "allez les rouges" underneath.
Camara's not French, and he's not the most famous striker in the Liverpool team, either. But this wildly erratic, shaven-headed Muslim footballer, best known for dropping to his knees and praying to Allah after scoring a goal for the reds on the day his father passed away, has what it takes to makes him the ultimate poster boy for connoisseurs of football and web fashion.
His T-shirt, created by nutmeg, is the polar opposite of the Gary Neville bathrobes you might find at the Manchester United superstore. McManus explains: "Football fans love to show their allegiance, but not everyone wants to wear a silky, shiny top with Sharp or Carlsberg or Dagenham Motors written on it. We wanted to make football clothing that you can wear to a club, or out in the evening, something a little subtler, with street styling.
"I also read an interesting article recently which suggests that people may start following particular football players instead of teams. I think that's happening already with the superstars of Euro 2000. It's the way it works in Japan, apparently. And I'm pretty sure there are some brand new Inter Milan fans in Ireland . . . me for starters!"
The reasoning behind selling the T-shirts on the Internet is clear. "It's actually very cheap to set up online - our domain name cost £15, our sitehosting is free, and we'll be fully enabling the site for credit card transactions shortly, which will cost $150 for a year. There's a global market for products like ours, so it's important to try to be on the web. It's a handy marketing tool, it's cool, it's cheap, it's fun."
Yet McManus is quick to point out the drawbacks too: "It isn't exactly the biggest earner for us though. You can't beat real shops for the moment." So who's the next player to earn the nutmeg seal of approval? "It's all still a bit hush-hush, but the front runners are an Arsenal player from Africa, a dreadlocked Celtic player and a certain Inter Milan striker, who ain't Christian Vieri!"
It seems we're at the end of a trend that started when Michael Jordan labels became cool and Tommy Hilfiger used his labels as design. Now, the cool thing is to avoid being branded. Anti-corporate books like Naomi Wolf's No Logo explain the extent to which companies like Nike go to exert hypnotic control over the clothes market. It's far too easy to buy what they say you should buy, and it used to be very hard not to. But now there's a choice. Why buy the Ronaldo T-shirt when you can have the Titi Camara one? Why buy Edgar Davids when you can get Robbie Keane? Whatever you want, you can find on the web. As long as it fits, you can wear it.
