Pop into any branch to stock up before your summer holidays and you'd be hard put to find a nice white T-shirt to take to the beach. Meanwhile, at French Connection, where they like to play around with letters, you'll find T-shirts decorated with acrostics. Depending on how you feel about yourself, you might want to go for 'Fit Chick, Unbelievable Knockers' or 'Frisky Chick, Usually Kops'. On the bus, in Tesco, at the dry cleaners, you'll see perfectly ordinary women going about their business, quiet and steady except for the fact that they have 'Old Slapper' scribbled across their chest. I don't care if they do.
Provocation is the whole point.
T-shirts are traditionally all about enraging the establishment and trying to upset the status quo. In the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties young people used them to protest against war, the monarchy, nuclear weapons. Hence the change of register. It wouldn't all be quite so disturbing if the dynamic between looker and looked-at was gender neutral. But you will hunt in vain for men's T-shirts with similar slogans.