M.C. Escher Hand With Reflective Globe T-Shirt

A hand holds a mirrored sphere, and in the sphere is the room, the window, the furniture, and Escher himself looking back out of it.

He made it in 1935, and the geometry is exact rather than imagined: a reflective sphere gathers almost the entire room into one image, and it always puts the person holding it dead centre, unmoving, no matter how they turn it. Escher pointed that out himself — that the eye of the person holding the globe sits at the immovable middle of the world, and cannot get out of it. It is a self-portrait about the impossibility of stepping outside your own point of view.

Daddy finds it the most quietly unsettling thing in the edit, and wears it more than any of the others.

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

Charcoal or black tee, dark jeans, a plain overshirt. Save it for the rooms where somebody will notice.