Every hero graphic in the 1st Collection is printed on the back. The snake and the roses, the framed lion, the angel in its cloud, the eye and the sun, the handwritten signature — all of it sits between the shoulder blades. The fronts are clean, or close to it. That is consistent enough across the line to be worth explaining.
The plain reason first. A chest print is a billboard aimed at whoever you are talking to. It sits in the space between two people having a conversation and takes a turn in that conversation whether or not you wanted it to. There is a kind of shirt that speaks before you do. It is a fine thing to own. It is not what this line is for.
A back print behaves differently. You are not showing it to the person in front of you. You are showing it to the room you have already walked through — the person behind you in the queue, the row behind you on the bus, whoever is following you up the last flight of stairs. The message goes out to people you are not performing for, which is a far better audience for anything sincere.
It also changes who the graphic belongs to. You cannot see your own back. Whatever is printed there you carry on trust: you chose it, you know it is there, and then you spend the whole day not looking at it. A shirt that works this way is closer to something you know about yourself than something you are announcing. That is the difference between wearing a message and being reminded of one.
There is a practical side too. A clean front is easier to live in. It layers under a jacket without an argument, it dates more slowly, and it lets the fit and the wash do the work up close, where they are the only things actually visible. The oversized cuts in this line hang from the shoulder, and a heavy front print fights that drape. The back is a flatter, larger, more forgiving canvas, and these graphics are detailed enough to want the room.
And it sets the register. Quiet from the front, considered from the back is a fairly precise description of the whole brand. Warmth found inside the cold is not a thing you can shout. Putting the statement where the wearer cannot see it and a stranger can is about as close as a shirt gets to saying something without raising its voice.
So the front is left mostly alone, on purpose. If you want to know what a piece is really about, open the back view on its product page. That is the front of the garment, in every sense except the literal one.
Written by Apricity. More on where all of this comes from in Our Story.