Best of T-Post: the magazine you can wear

I love magazines that do things differently, and as far as I know, T-Post is the only magazine that doubles as an item of clothing. Each issue features one piece of artwork printed on the front of a t-shirt and a story printed on the inside back, and the whole thing comes packaged in a cardboard folder that also features the image and text.

It’s a lovely project that has been quietly plugging away for years in northern Sweden, and to date they’ve racked up an impressive 130 issues. We caught up with founder Peter Lundgren to get his pick of the best t-shirts he’s published / released so far – take a quick scroll through the selection below, and if you like what you see, use the code TPOSTCREW2 when you subscribe to get a free crewneck shirt (valid until 4 February)…

Issue 128: Fatta Man
“We teamed up with the fantastic initiative Fatta Man, which translates to ‘Get it Man’. They’re working to promote a better understanding of consensual sex and reduce the rate of sexual assaults. The design was made by the multitalented Marc Strömberg, and inspired by Fatta Man’s work using symbols for twisted manhood like roosters driving pink hummers and guns shooting rainbows. A modern Hawaiian shirt if you will.”

Issue 125: Doing The Dirty Work
“I don’t know why, but I’ve always wanted to work in a garage. I guess it’s the satisfaction of getting my hands dirty doing something far away from all that is digital and artificial, which usually surrounds my desk. To be able to build or fix something up for real compared to making stuff that could be erased forever by a simple hard drive crash can’t even begin to compare.

“To make this issue we had a mechanic do a full day’s work in his garage wearing a crisp white T-shirt. The end result is what he’d normally throw in the wash, or more likely in the trash, but for us it’s a celebration to leaving the screen for a minute, even if it’s only to change a tyre on the car or dig a hole and fill it back up again.”

Issue 101: Where You’re From is Number One
“I’d been thinking about making a tribute issue to my home town Umeå for years. But my only problem was, what could be interesting enough about a small northern Swedish town to tell all our subscribers in over 50 countries about? So, to dodge that bullet, I asked the Umeå-based rap collective Random Bastards to do it for me. It ended up being an eight-verse song about what they think is best about living in Umeå.

“Over the last year the song has been played closed to two million times on Spotify. We actually got word from Spotify that the UÅ song was the most played song on Spotify in all of the northern part of Sweden, period. T-post & Random Bastards vs. Drake: 1 – 0!”

Issue 124: The Dialect of Art
Kenneth Olzon lives in Holmsveden, which is a small village in the south part of Sweden with precisely 92 inhabitants. He paints Kurbits; an invented, fantastical symbol of vegetal fertility based on a gourd or pumpkin and principally used for ornamentation in Swedish folk art and on painted furniture and domestic objects. They were done by painters, mainly from the province of Dalarna, who specialised in the style, and whose signatures are often to be found on many of their creations.

I think Kurbits is one of the most interesting and beautiful art forms out there today and one of the few art styles that are mainly exercised in one area of the world and often handed down from generation to generation. It’s a perfect example of how art can mutate into something new depending on where it’s exercised and who and what you are surrounded by while doing it. Everything affects you whether you like it or not.

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Pick up a free heavyweight crewneck shirt worth €70 when you subscribe using the code TPOSTCREW2 (valid until 4 Feb)