Wassily Kandinsky On White II (Auf Weiss) 1923 T-Shirt

Painted in 1923, the year Kandinsky was teaching at the Bauhaus, and the point at which his abstraction stopped being weather and became architecture.

Two heavy black bars cross the white ground, and everything else — the triangles, the arcs, the small hard blocks of colour — is arranged in the tension between them. He had written a book arguing that colour and form could work on a person the way music does, without depicting anything at all, and this is that argument executed with a ruler.

Daddy likes it for the same reason he likes a good building: you can look at it for a long time and keep finding the load-bearing part.

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 white tee, dark denim, and a plain jacket if the room needs one. Let the geometry be the only event.