Ian Kenneth Bird shoots iconic graphic T-shirt designs from the mid-80s to now

Following a recent exhibition at The Goodhood Store in London celebrating the world’s best graphic T-shirt designers, London-based photographer and longtime skater Ian Kenneth Bird has shot some of the original T-shirts in his recognisable style. The in-store exhibition, which has now finished, looked at influential designs from the mid-80s to 1999 and showed the development of the graphic tee through iconic or undocumented designs. “There was something quite interesting about shooting the models in T-shirts that are older than they are,” says Ian, whose work we have featured previously.

“The T-shirt’s ease of production has made it a vehicle for many different subcultural movements and I became fascinated with the period just before the internet – it’s like a forgotten land where art, bands and fashion don’t exist unless they’ve been transferred to the digital age,” explains Kyle Stewart, one of the co-founders of Goodhood.