The Daily Mail has a lovely, glowing travel piece on Cleveland up this week, which normally wouldn’t be anything worth noting, but the eagle-eyed author makes prominent note of the city’s collective fashion sense.
It’s not even a footnote or an aside in the piece. It’s one of the three teasers up top, sandwiched between our shared sense of loyalty and our art, sports and music.
“…everyone there wears a T-shirt emblazoned with ‘Cleveland'”
Which, while a tad exaggerated, isn’t exactly wrong…?
Anyway, here’s the lede:
In most parts of the world, if you were to wear a T-shirt bearing the name of a city, it would mark you out as a tourist. In Cleveland, things are different – if you’re NOT wearing a T-shirt with the name of the city on it you look like a tourist.Yes, most of us have a drawer full of Cleveland gear, whether it’s for The Sports, purchased on our own volition, or acquired as a gift from some unimaginative aunt who doesn’t know us very well and didn’t really have that much interest in thinking of a unique gift and boy are they just busy and hey, there’s the Cleveland Clothing Co., they’ll just grab something there, oh there’s only XXXXLs left, well they can always come back and exchange it for something else.Whether it’s one of the sports teams – the Indians, the Cavs or the Browns – or just the famous city script, Cleveland T-shirts are everywhere you look. Moms on the school run, construction guys on their way to work, waitresses at the neighbourhood diner – they’re all proud to wear their heart on their sleeve and Cleveland on their shirt.
Many of our shirts are bad, of course, and a healthy portion are pooped out in the same tried and true formula (mix one part sports team colorway with some variation on text like Cleveland vs. the World) you’ll find in Detroit or Toledo or wherever. Sure, Cleveland’s t-shirt industrial complex leaves us with a brand per capita ratio that’s probably not sustainable and definitely not necessary, but that doesn’t answer the question of why, once this stuff’s in our drawer, we actually take it out and wear it.
The author seems to ascribe some civic loyalty to the preponderance of Clevo gear he saw on the streets. That’s one way to look at it. There’s also, of course, a way to look at that as confirmation that we’re a bunch of sartorial rubes.
This article appears in Oct 10-16, 2018.
The guy is really hopped up (a two-hour hop from Iceland, a short hop to Gordon Square) and did a lot of hopping from one Cleveland tourist attraction to another, but he thinks Ohio City and “Hingetown” (gag, retch, hate that stupid name) are SUBURBS?
And let’s get real here, folks…the snarks about our dress, specifically, the T-shirts that say “Cleveland” on them in one form or another, are an indication that despite liking Cleveland a lot, it’s Clevelanders taht he can’t stand, and that he thinks we’re all hicks and hayseeds.
Consider the source, as well…the Daily Mail is the National Enquirer of the UK…not fit to wrap catshit in or to line a birdcage with. So what does that make HIM?
Read the full piece and try not to vomit after reading theseveral dozen lame and trite and pathetic comments…most of them negative about this city…the usual cliches. Too many people in this world still think we’re a shithole city with a river that still burns on a regular basis.
Wonder if there are other shamelessly segregated cities that successfully had to market itself to, well, itself …
Can most of these shirts have been purchased by near and far west-side tourists who only actually visit CLEVELAND proper on game-day or JT or Taylor concert nights? Hmmm …
Probably not.
City residents buy the shirts. Suburbanites buy the shirts. Tourists buy the shirts. Business travelers buy the shirts. Old geezers and teens and twentysomething hipsters and middle-aged parents buy the shirts. Blacks buy the shirts. Whites buy the shirts. Hispanics and Asians and multi-racial folks buy the shirts. But sonebody who zeroes in on Cleveland as a”shamelessly segregated city that successfully had to market itself to, well, itself … ” robably doesn’t live here…or buy any shirts…
I don’t/won’t buy one of those shirts. I don’t care to advertise. What, people buy the shirts, because they forget where they are?
Why all the snark?
What are they advertising, other than that they like it here?
Ever hear of civic pride?
You don’t think they do this anywhere else?
No T-shirts worn by people in NYC? San Francisco? Chicago? Bullshirt!
Maybe not to the degree Clevelanders do it, but folks do it all over the US.
It’s the T-shirt Era!
Here is the headline on that article from across the pond…
Cleveland? It’s America down to a T! Discovering the delights of a sensational city and finding the perfect place to experience the REAL USA
90% Clevelanders are sooo sensitive. We do wear a lot of local shirts for sure. So what they made a observation and had to fill in some space. Read the whole thing it is very positive…
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/article…
I read the whole thing…he “hops” all over the place, to all the usual attractions…and then he gets kind of snarky about the T-shirt thing.
And finally, I read all the dozens of comments…mostly the usual lame and trite crap about burning rivers and mistakes on the lake and the like…the same thing people have said about Cleveland for years. Mostly people who have never been here. You can tell. Probably the same people who rag on Chicago about murders and guns and Al Capone. Rat-a-tat-tat-and bang-bang. Wake up, you mopes.
Obviously, the Daily Mail story had little effect on them, because they were still overwhelmingly negative about this city. The writer was not the one being an asshat…but the readers certainly were. GFY, clowns.