The Typography of Girls’ Asses
March 29th, 2006
The Typography of Girls’ Asses:
It became the thing in the late-1990s from what I remember, or maybe a little later. Those sweatpants and shorts marketed towards teenage girls with things printed across the rear end like “Angel,” “Princess,” “Queen,” and “Hooker.” Okay, I haven’t seen a hooker one yet, but I’m sure it’s available. The retailers even print their names on the asses too-Abercrombie, Hollister, Juicy, American Eagle, encouraging their customers to advertise their brand across their size negative 5 anorexic behind. They aren’t all negative 5 though; unfortunately the oblivious fleshy behinds sport them too. Colleges and sports teams sell booty type too, wanting the women to shake that “go team” ass from the bleachers to the dorm rooms.
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While browsing the summer fashions at my nearest American Eagle (Abercrombie was closed for renovations), I realized that this booty type is in fact similar to public signage that I’ve worked so closely with over the years: it’s meant to be seen, it’s communicating important and relevant information, it can be used to alert people of a problem (“SLUT!”), or it can simply be pointing out a scenic overlook. The major shortfall that plagues the designs first and foremost is that their choices in typography are severely lacking. On a pair of capri shorts I saw while being run down by 15 year old girls who hold month-long packages to the tanning salon (you’re not fooling anyone, by the way), read “Sun Kissed” in a horrendous brush script. The only choice more vile than that would have been Papyrus or Comic Sans—the bête noire of professional designers. Aéropostale carried a similar line of active shorts that read “sweet thing” and “lucious” [sic] in an alterni-pop script that has taken the 2000s by storm. In fact, on a number of them I had trouble making out what exactly they said; when that booty is racing by in the other direction, there’s no way I would be able to figure out that she really is that lucious. A more readable swiss design like Helvetica, Univers or Frutiger, spaced out optically in lower-case letters would have been much more viewer-friendly.
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A must-read, I think you’ll agree.