Joan Miró Woman Dreaming of Escape 1945 T-Shirt

Painted in 1945, the year the war ended, by a Catalan who had spent it inside Franco’s Spain making work that could not say what it meant.

Miró’s language by then was fixed and entirely his own: black lines, flat fields of red, blue and yellow, and shapes that are almost figures — an eye, a limb, a star. Nothing in it is decorative, and the title is not a metaphor he added afterwards. A woman dreaming of escape, painted in 1945, in that country, means precisely what it says. He had already refused to leave and refused to comply, and this is what refusal looks like when it has to stay abstract.

Daddy rates it the best-looking shirt in the edit, and the one whose story most people do not know.

The shirt itself is the good kind of basic: combed ring-spun cotton, preshrunk, side-seamed so it hangs straight, taped shoulders so the collar doesn’t twist after the fortieth wash. It fits like the tee you’ve had for ten years, on day one.

How to wear it

White tee, dark denim, no other colour anywhere. In summer, on its own; in winter, under a plain jacket.