From time to time we feature somebody on our blog who’s doing interesting stuff with our blank tees, and this week it’s Joe from Crucial Times Clothing. He started his fashion business last year and hand screen-prints his designs on Fruit of the Loom heavy cotton T-shirts as he finds them good value for money and high quality.

Joe uses tumblr, facebook and word of mouth to promote his T-shirts, and sells through big cartel. We love his designs, let us know what you think!

He says he has new designs and ideas going on all the time and that soon he wants to offer a service where, for a small fee, people can send him a design and he’ll make it into a screen print and print it up for them.

You can find his images or buy T-shirts through the following links:

Crucial Times Clothing facebook page

Crucial Times Clothing shop

Crucial Times Clothing tumblr

Do you do something with our blank products? Let us know, we’d love to feature you next! Comment below, tweet us @poloshirts or post your images on our Facebook page

Jubilee fever is here, in case you hadn’t noticed. It’s a particularly British kind of fever though, and the symptoms include grumbling, head-shaking and negative comments. If you’re not a Brit, it would be easy to believe we’re not looking forward to the Jubilee and the Olympics, but that’s just the way we show our enthusiasm along with queuing and complaining about the weather. We love it really.

And red, white and blue are everywhere. Union Jack biscuits, dip-dye haircuts and waistcoats abound, so how does the average stylish individual cope with this sudden desire to dress like a deckchair on acid?

The answer is coordination. For men, this year’s big deal on casual clothing will be white. Spearheaded by the David Beckham underwear phenomenon, layered white clothing will be big for guys: aim for a white vest, under a white shirt or a white polo-shirt with white jeans and a navy jacket. Don’t attempt this look with very short hair though, as it can easily start to look like you’re an escaped mental patient, especially if you’re slim built. The hair look that goes with white clothing is longer than in many recent summers, tousled and shiny.

For women this year the trend will be into the navy end of the spectrum, picked out with a lot of bling. For casual wear, try mixing it up with a blue skirt and hoody with platform trainers and a big diamante brooch, or jeans, a striped blue and white shirt, pearls and a sleek updo finished off with a red, white and blue bow or rosette.

More formal wear is looking Olympian with blazers for both men and women being worn over pastel polo shirts. Taffeta skirts are around for women, worn with a camisole and beaded cardigans to allow for the changeable British weather. Umbrellas are de rigueur and of course the only acceptable brolly colour this year is red, white and blue!

If you’ve been inspired by the new Stella McCartney uniforms and want to dress in the same streamlined style as Britain’s Olympic hopefuls, here are a few tips to help you get the look and to get the fitness, if not of an Olympian, at least of a contender!

1. Focus on navy – Stella McCartney chose a dense shade of navy to be the background of many of the uniform components, to create an effect of strength and solidity. Navy blue T-shirts and vests are great for showing off well-sculpted arms, and if you’re aren’t brilliantly developed, try some fake tan to help give definition to pecs.

2. Combine tight and loose – soft flowing jog pants look good with camisole tops for women, while men can benefit from skin-tight cycling shorts worn with loose polo-shirts: the contrast in shape and form can help hide major problems such as a pot belly.

3. Red shoes – McCartney put her athletes in red training shoes, and that’s likely to be a keynote of this year’s sporting looks in the UK, so if you can’t get red shoes, try for socks that are solid red or have a red band to them, red gloves for winter running or football training and red hats or baseball caps for summer training.

4. Hoodies are definitely very much part of the focus, and the lighter the fabric weight the better, as layering sports clothing is going to be crucial for our athletes this year, in the UK’s changeable summer climate.

Fake clothing, bags, DVDs and cigarettes are to be found all over the world, but particularly in established retail locations where students and tourists congregate, such as California. Current confiscations there suggest that the ‘underground economy’ could be costing the state around $8 billion annually. The people making the garments are poorly paid, and the lack of tax paid on them means jobs are not created and local services are not funded. Lose-lose all round.

The goods are often sold in markets or as part of festivals, and a key feature of the new black economy is the creation of ‘second-hand’ counterfeit clothing from brands such as Hilfiger (jeans) and Lacoste (polo shirts) which are less liable to such close inspection as new clothing. Just because it’s not new, doesn’t make it genuine!

And in the UK, fakers are costing the economy, and individuals, a great deal. A recently sentenced man was found to have more than 6,000 fake designer clothing labels in his possession and to be running a factory scale counterfeit operation that was producing several hundred garments a month.

So why not buy a fake? In terms of casual clothing, it can look like a good deal to buy a knockoff pair of jeans or a counterfeit hoodie but in the long term, casual clothing brands work hard to maintain their quality and the longevity of the garments they offer, so cheap versions of top of the range clothing may last no time at all and may warp or twist, fade or even tear where poor quality fabric is placed under stress to match high quality originals. Even if those things don’t happen, counterfeit garments usually collapse very quickly, becoming saggy and bobbly – giving a clear indication that they are not the real thing. While the bargain looks enticing on the market stall, if it doesn’t hold up to continued wear and laundering, it may be an expensive mistake.

A professional networking coach in the USA has come up with a fascinating way to help graduates get a good job.

Her theory is that the current generation of college students have spent so much time on their mobiles or computers that they have lost the ability to network effectively and so they miss out on chances to obtain employment.

Her idea is to equip students with a simple grey T-shirt that bears the legend netWORKing on the front and on the back a printed ticklist of careers such as engineering, technology, sales, insurance … and then a dotted line that allows the individual to fill in their career aims or specific skills with an indelible marker, supplied with each garment.

It seems to be popular: orders have been placed by half a dozen American colleges already.

Any innovative graduate, class or college could undertake something similar – a white hoodie with an overprinted message about the skills of the wearer could be just the thing for a job fair, and a band, group of collaborators or ensemble could print T-shirts with their key skills and availability on them.

As businesses increasingly invest in uniforms for staff, more and more people are trying to look good in workplace clothing that wouldn’t be their personal choice of attire.

If your employer wants you to look smart and professional, it’s one thing. But if the workplace uniform is a colour that makes you look ill, or fits you badly or just doesn’t sit well with your personal clothing style, it can become a source of tension and even stress.

There are a number of things you can do, to prevent this being a problem.

1. If you get to choose your uniform from a catalogue, ask for samples. The manufacturer or printer of company clothing will usually be able to provide pieces for you to look at and that will help you assess the fit of the clothing and how it will be to wear. That helps you make wise choices about what you opt for.
2. Examine the fit, where possible, by looking at the existing uniform worn by colleagues. It is always better to buy a size bigger and pay a little to have your clothing fitted to your form, than to buy too small and cram yourself into something uncomfortable for an eight or ten hour day.
3. If the colour is bad for you, look at what you can do to accessorise your workplace uniform. There are often restrictions on what you can wear over uniform but not under it, so a black polo-neck under an unflattering yellow or red polo will ‘take down’ the strong colour, or a pink camisole under a white shirt will add life to a colour that kills your complexion.

This year’s key summer fashions are sport and fun related – they are girls dressing as guys and grown men dressing in a more childlike fashion. Don’t get it wrong though – the boy look is not for work: this year men are dressing smartly for work and for fun in their time off, and it’s not just a casual look either, the boy look requires a kind of style that has a sharp and amusing edge to it.

For men this means working with colour: dyed denim is big this year so it might be bright red jeans with a white T-shirt and a pair of spotty or chequerboard Converse trainers. For the beach it could mean ‘cartoon’ shorts (ie a pair long and baggy enough to flap around) in bright blue or red, worn with a yellow or green baseball cap and a curl of hair that flips about boy-style. It doesn’t mean clever slogans on T-shirts, looking too cool, or wearing all one colour.

For women the tomboy look is definitely featuring baseball jackets or blousons, often made of silk and worn over many layered vests to give a lightweight but athletic look to casual clothing. Boyfriend jeans are big, as are Capri pants or joggers in bright but not girly colours: think purple, green and yellow, rather than pink or powder blue. The boiler-suit is trying to make a come-back but it may not be this year that it breaks through again. Oversize T-shirts are heading back though, worn over a contrast colour camisole and leggings, with Converse high-tops.

Researchers at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, have found some interesting features of workplace clothing that are revealed in a recent issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Not only can our clothing influence the way other people think about us, it can actually influence the way we think!

According to the research, “ …cloth[ing] can have profound and systematic psychological and behavioural consequences for … wearers,” – what that means is that work-wear that is generally associated with attentive and careful behaviour, such as lab coats, will actually make the person wearing them more attentive and careful.

Of course this theory is individual specific – so if you associate T-shirts with creative endeavour, you may feel more creative when wearing a T-shirt to work, but if you associate hoodies with lounging around the house at weekends, you may find that wearing one to work actually decreases your productivity. Adam Galinsky, a co-author of the paper, calls this process of being influenced by clothing “enclothed cognition”.

For workplaces that don’t have a dress code this may be an incentive to reconsider their stance, and for individuals preparing for interviews, it may be worth considering which colours they associate with positivity and confidence and which shirts and trousers (or skirts) make them feel assured and dependable, as those are the qualities that they may gain from their clothing during the interview itself.

Asda has been conducting research – and it reveals that 68% of shoppers spend money on clothing to cheer themselves up, and that the clothing they choose tends to be brightly coloured. According to Asda, women will reach for red, purple and yellow to boost their confidence on a bad day.

So how does it work?

Medically speaking, colour therapy is not a science but there are several forms of sensory ‘therapy’ that give a person experience of specific colours either in their clothing, or in their environment, or sometimes in the way their home or office is lit: the efficacy of this as a medical treatment is unclear, but the effect of certain colours is long known to have been powerful in influencing others: that’s why monarchs or rulers have always chosen red and purple, which connote majesty and power (and maybe, sexual power too, as red is the traditional colour of sex workers) and spiritual leaders have always chosen pale blue and white, colours seen as being ‘pure’ and full of hope and life.

Yellow is a fascinating colour that falls in and out of favour: many men like to wear yellow in summer as they see it as being sporty – so yellow polo shirts and yellow or yellow checked shorts tend to start selling well around Easter. Women wear yellow in times of optimism, but reject it in times of pessimism, so if yellow is a big colour this year, it’s likely that people will be feeling positive about the economic climate.

If you want to look positive and attract others, the best colour to wear as a man, apparently, is a bright light blue so a turquoise jacket or hoodie would be ideal, while for women, it’s a small amount of red with pink or white, so a white and red ringer T-shirt with pink Capris or a white long-sleeved T-shirt with a long red and white gingham skirt would be perfect. And if you think those colour combinations sound like something out of a Rock Hudson/Debbie Reynolds movie, you’d be right … because those are considered to be amongst the most upbeat films around!

In a cautionary tale, American high school basketball has just had a minor infringement of rules become a major national debating point, all because of the colour of some T-shirts. It’s Make-A-Wish week in the USA and loads of people are taking part in charitable fundraising, just as we do here for Red Nose Day or Children In Need. At Burke High School (Nebraska) the team decided to wear pink – the Make-A-Wish colour – instead of the classic white home uniform and to auction off the uniform tops afterwards to raise funds for the charity. Their competitors, Columbus Discoverers, wore red away tops.

At half-time, one of the Columbus management team raised a formal complaint, saying that the uniform worn by Burke did not comply with league rules and no advance warning of a uniform change had been given. As a result, a technical foul was given against the home team who were one point in the lead at the half time break.

It’s the kind of question that’s arising a lot in sport at present – what’s honourable, what’s acceptable, when are rules enforced and when not? Is it okay not to shake hands with another player? Is it okay to change uniform clothing for a good cause without consulting others involved? What kind of language is acceptable in the heat of the moment during a sporting crisis?

Basically, the basketball officials had no choice but to award the foul once the matter was brought to their attention and the final result, 62-47 to Columbus, made it really insignificant that they’d pointed out the infringement. But it’s worth always bearing in mind, whether you play for a local 5-a-side football team that wears jerseys and one day decides to move to V-necked T-shirts or organise vests for a local running club, that there are often rules about sports clothing that need to be understood and observed and raising money for charity is not considered an adequate reason for breaking them.