southtwelfth: Let’s say you’re running a novelty...

Monday, January 30, 2012

Let’s say you’re running a novelty mesh cap business in the 1970s. Maybe it’s called “Novelty Hats International, Ltd.” You have a hilarious idea for a hat that a guy that’s going hunting could wear. It’s a little class warfare-y, a little tongue-in-cheek. It suggests an absurd reality — a world turned upside down — where, upon entering the ranks of international finance, one is issued a red mesh cap that reads “INT’L FINANCE” on the front. And you, a hilarious 1970s dude with a mustache, have been entered into those ranks.

(An aside: here’s a thing people forget — the ironic mesh cap is not an original product of the ’00s. There were armies of future dads walking around in the 1970s and ’80s with ironic mesh caps that ironically suggested that their bald spots were solar generators for sex machines, or that their beer bellies were fuel tanks for sex machines. The fact that their future children would co-opt these same ironic hats their fathers already wore ironically doubled the irony back on itself, creating a feedback loop of overpowering misunderstandings of the very concept of “ironic,” which is why you probably sometimes feel as if you’ve spent the last twelve years living inside a 12-page term paper written by a first-year cultural studies major at a “safety” east coast college. I know I have.)

But anyway, what typeface would you use, were you to design, create, and market such a hat?

Well, I guess you’d use Windsor.

(Via iteeth, via Meshcaps.com)

INTL FINANCE is the new WORLD CHAMPION