Photorealistic full-screen sweatshirts

The Mr. Gugu & Miss Go "Photorealistic Sweaters" line is one of those so-bad-it's-good uses of technology: full-garment screens of kitschy, colorful subjects on sweaters. I can't tell if they're blank on the back. What I really want is for every inch of these things to be screened, inside and out, with eye-melting graphics.

Mr. Gugu & Miss Go Photorealistic Sweaters (via Super Punch)

• [Rich Keller]

  Kai’s Convolver from the mid 1990s would be perfect for designing crazy patterns for this, if anyone still has a copy that works. The Aztec one comes close.

  • [Cowicide]

    if anyone still has a copy that works

    Ha, I have a an old, bootalbe clone of OS X that has it installed as a Kai plugin into an old version of Photoshop.  Thanks for reminding me I still have that thing.

• [UnderachievingSheep]

  These sweaters are monstrous and not in a good way (ok, maybe except the Nebula one, I’d probably wear that) but the copy cracked me up:

  You’re standing at the pearly gates. Queuing before you is a woman who died in her Sunday finest. St. Peter tilts his sunglasses and looks her up and down: “Sorry, not today, darling.” As she’s ushered towards purgatory, you step forward wearing a sweater with a photorealistic print of Tutankhamen. St. Peter gives you a friendly nod and unhooks the velvet curtain into paradise. You knew it. Bouncers knew it. Even St. Peter knows it. Mr. Gugu & Miss Go make the kind of sweaters you would be seen dead in.

  Also: they are 100% Polyester and made in Poland. I am not sure I can with so much oddity packed in a single item of clothing.

• [upso]

  i can dig it

• [Thorzdad]

  These are one of those things I’d really need to see in-person, to evaluate just how good the printing really is. Is it as bright and eye-popping as they’re presenting? Is the print quality going to be durable, or is it going to rub-off easily? It’s pretty obvious that the selections on their website are not actual product. They’re just images dropped into a sweatshirt template in Photoshop.

  I’m liking the purple nebula one, myself, though.

• [chgoliz]

  Apparently not available from their sister site serving the US, and the US is not on their shipping list at the main site, so…..phooey on youey for raising our hopes only to dash them, Cory.

  I do wonder about the term “sweater” to describe it.  In order to be printed on, the item is probably woven fabric, not knitted.

  edited to add: I just noticed that the printing goes around the inside of the back of the collar, suggesting that the image is printed on the back too. If, that is, the image is an accurate representation.

  • [Jake Rennie]

    The designer’s store http://mrgugumissgo.bigcartel.com/ seems to ship internationally, at least that’s what the checkout option would suggest. (I edited this comment after finding this out.)

  • [Joseph Francis]

     Is it dye sublimation?

    • [mattias skoglund]

      Since it’s printed on a synthetic material, I’m almost certain it is.

• [Tedhealey]

  DID WE NOT **LEARN** FROM THE 70S????

• [Kathryn Greenwood Swanson]

  http://badsmellingboy.com/

  He does this so well.  Takes it way beyond.

• [Dave Jenkins]

  Just so you know: those are not photos of the actual product.  These have been ‘sshooped (I can tell by the pixels).  Note how the sweater is the exact same shape for all products (look at the left sleeve near the wrist).  It’s a common practice for ecommerce catalogs: shoot one product, then mask the other designs into the shape, or shift colors using Photoshop.

• [Ashley Barber]

  It’s pretty common in the garment industry to just put the image on a photo of the shirt for mock up purposes.  This is clearly what they’ve done here.  I would highly doubt that the printed product continues on to the back, or they would be showing it on their site that way (a sort of “Hey we can do this!” kind of thing).  It takes an extremely specialized set up to get that kind of a print.  Seeing as how they’re 100% polyester, I would say they are probably sublimated and not actually screened.  Source: I work at a high-volume screen printer.

• [welcomeabored]

  ‘You’ve been in an accident and you’re barely conscious.  In the emergency room, the nurses use scissors to cut your jeans and underwear off your body.  You think about how you haven’t done laundry for a month.  But you’re safe from embarrassment because they’re too dazzled by your sweater to notice the hash marks in your drawers. Thanks Mr. Gugu and Miss Go!’

  Say ‘sweater’ to me, and I think ‘handknit’.  These would be a nightmare.  Kaffee Fassett and Alice Starmore both would throw up their hands in despair… and there are online support groups for getting through the patterns of those two designers.

  • [IronEdithKidd]

    If these designs weren’t so heinous, I’d be tempted to say “challenge accepted”.  

    Mr. Gugu and Miss Go:  bringing the tacky sweatshirt bar down a notch lower than you thought it possible to go.

• [Cameron Postelwait]

  this has and will always be so bad it’s really bad.. zero irony potential.

• [Adam]

  if like those, i think you’re gonna love these:

  http://www.idilvice.com/

• [Terry Border]

  Just because you can do it doesn’t mean that you should.

• [blueelm]

  You know… I want the price of having these printed to come down enough that I could put together an order of my own because I have ideas and I don’t see them anywhere. Everywhere it’s the same thing: Space, candy, pets. There are soooo many horrible and wonderful things that really you could do with this kind of printing. Why are people so freaking limiting to themselves!?

• [MarlboroTestMonkey7]

  The fries sweter makes me wanna puke and cry

• [Trevour]

  If this is dye sublimation (which I’m sure it is – I used to work in the industry), calling the images above “screens” is a bit of a misnomer since there is no actual screenprinting involved. Dye sublimation for apparel involves printing the color graphics on giant sheets of paper, then transferring them to the garment via a heat press. You can press both sides of the shirt at once too (sheet on top, sheet on bottom).
  There are obviously pros and cons to both screen or “sub” (as they call it), but sublimation saves the headache of setting up giant screens for spot color, virtually giving you an unlimited color palette. It also allows for small quantity runs (even on-demand printing) since you could print as little as one shirt, one time. Colors/values aren’t quite as vibrant as the Photoshopped “catalog” images though – for instance, blacks maybe appear more of a 90-95% grey in reality.

  Here’s one sublimation job I designed (for some celebration that was MN Vikings themed, hence the yellow/purple and that dude’s caricature), where you can see the front and back.

  Dye sublimation is cool and all (I mean, look at those all-over possibilities!), but I’ll always prefer the art of a good color-separated screenprint.