It’s easy to laugh off “I Love New York” t-shirts as a temporary trend that became a pop-culture fixture, but dismissing it as a cultural phenomenon is not a wise decision. The popularity of these simply-designed t-shirts, with their simple but timeless statement, is a useful lesson to anyone interested in marketing, design, or sociology in general.
“I Love New York” t-shirts date back to 1977, when New York State hired a major advertising firm (Wells Rich Greene) and an independent designer (Milton Glaser) to help come up with a temporary tourism marketing campaign for New York State. In one of the greatest marketing ironies of all time, the “I Love New York” t-shirts and associated products were a hit — but they were a hit forever associated with the city of New York, rather than the state, as intended.
This points to the first important factor in analyzing “I Love New York” t-shirts. The point is not the information these shirts convey, but their ability to remind people of what they’re already thinking, and to catalyze action based on that. When someone sees another person wearing an “I Love New York” t-shirt, their reaction isn’t “Oh! How persuasive! I guess I should love New York, too!” It’s something entirely different: “I do love New York.”
Most of us don’t have any illusions about how other people think of the city. We all know that there are at least eight million reasons to love the city, and probably plenty more that aren’t quite compelling enough. But when people wear “I Love New York” t-shirts, they’re thinking of whatever makes the city special to them: perhaps an older person is remembering the first time they visited the city, or their years there as a student and a starving artist; someone else might remember the hours of shopping on Fifth Avenue, or spending all day in the Barnes & Noble at Union Square. Others could recall bad experiences that turned out all right: getting lost in a tough neighborhood, then approached by a sinister stranger — who kindly directed them to the nearest subway stop. “I Love New York” t-shirts are about how what we can have in common is that we love the city, even if we all disagree on what makes it so great.
A shirt like that, or a slogan like that, is pretty hard to come by. If something is universally popular, some people will try to lay exclusive claim to it, and then liking the universal means supporting the specific. But, like a few other New York-related designs, “I Love New York” t-shirts have escaped this fate. When we wear them, we’re just saying we love the city — nothing else. And that’s how it should be.
Will anyone duplicate the success of “I Love New York” t-shirts? I doubt it. One of the strongest elements behind the success of the design was that so many people wanted it to succeed — New Yorkers are proud that theirs is a city with a universally recognized logo, and business and stores in the city are certainly glad to get the extra attention. Creating a successor is probably an insurmountable challenge. But the current slogan is doing just fine thus far.
Byrne Hobart is a New Yorker with widely, perhaps even bizarrely varied interests. He is one of the few people who dares to wear “I Love New York” t-shirts while actually in New York.
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