When did the idea of the ironic T-shirt as an existing phenomenon enter our language and culture, and where did the idea that it was the province of hipsters come from? The Wikipedia entry on T-shirts claims that they started to become ironic in this decade, while the popular “Hipster Olympics” video (which was posted last summer, but made jokes that went stale at least five years ago) suggests that they are one of the prevailing preoccupations of the hipster lifestyle. When I think of T-shirts with ironic messaging, I think of Naomi Campbell wearing a T-shirt reading “Models Suck” in Girl 6 (1996, by the way), or some suburban douchebag on Ludlow Street on a Friday night wearing a T-shirt inscribed with “The Man, The Legend,” with an up arrow and a down arrow to identify which was which. Ironic, perhaps, but not especially hipsterish.

Now, I’ve been accused of hipsterishness, and I wouldn’t be caught dead in an ironic T-shirt, or really, any T-shirt with any kind of messaging at all (I suppose I telegraph my hipsterishness by preferring solid-colored V-necks). The only ironic T-shirt I can remember having worn was one that read “I’m a Stanford Mom,” when I was 17 and also liked to wear sailor pants and had a shoulder-length bob. I don’t think I was hip then by anyone’s standards. A friend of mine achieved considerable success making T-shirts with messages like “Emotionally Unavailable” and “I’ve got some coke left let’s go back to your place” and “Butt sex is itchy” on them, but they definitely weren’t for hipsters—though I guess you could say it was hipsters coming up with the lines. In general, however, I think so-called hipsters are too hipsterish for irony, especially printed on a T-shirt. If you have to advertise your hipsterishness that way, you’re probably not really that hip.

Still, the meme persists. I noticed it recently in a New York Times article suggesting that Staten Island is the new Williamsburg (“Others have packed up their guitars, their ironic T-shirts, their dark, square-rimmed glasses and their porkpie hats”). Other recent Times articles reference the “distressed jeans and ironic T-shirt crowd” at Art Basel and the look of the “posteverything generation” (apparently, “skinny jeans, thick-framed glasses, an ironic T-shirt and oversize retro headphones”). Googling the phrase “ironic T-shirt,” I found an “ironic” archive on a blog called Tcritic.com (shirt of the day: “I’m Fucking Matt Damon,” of course), which clued me in to the fact that there’s a whole world of T-shirt bloggers posting madly away in their odd corner of the online universe. I wonder if this is a phenomenon with an expiration date, or if it’s with us to stay. It seems tailor-made for a New York Times Magazine feature. They could run one of their ill-advised fashion spreads, and have William Safire and Rob Walker collaborate on a column to accompany it—”Consumed by Language,” maybe?