Temo Rivera, a teacher in Morelia, Mexico, was shopping in the men’s section of his local Sears recently when he picked up an awfully familiar looking T-shirt. The image on the front showed E.T. in silhouette making a call from a phone booth. The same graphic was on a shirt he’d ordered from Threadless, the online T-shirt company run out of a warehouse on Ravenswood near Irving Park. He checked the label: the mark under the collar said “JNS Jeanious,” which he says is a Sears house brand. A couple weeks later he spotted another Threadless design at Sears, a pileup of demented bunnies eyeing a forlorn carrot. This one also had the JNS Jeanious label. He snapped a couple pictures with his phone and posted them to his Flickr account, where it was noticed by blogger Chris Glass and then blogged again at Mediabistro’s Unbeige.
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Once or twice the finger has even pointed back at Threadless. Last winter Preshrunk reported that a Threadless design by “rocket-robyn” called “Tagged,” showing two kids back-to-back under giant umbrellas spray-painting in the rain, was lifted directly from a stencil by Australian graffiti artists Miso and Ghostpatrol. Threadless checked it out, acknowledged the rip-off, and stopped selling the shirt. Miso and Ghostpatrol didn’t blame Threadless, though. “They didn’t take the design knowing that it was stolen,” Miso wrote at StencilRevolution. “This is the fault of the ‘designer.’” A couple commenters at Threadless’s blogs weren’t so sure. “On the off chance that someone rips off a design i’ve done . . . i would definitely seek reparations from threadless,” wrote an artist who’s submitted 35 designs (with no winners yet). She also thought they should “do a background check with the subbers available websites etc.”
