Decorator Profile
A picture paints a thousand words
There are as many screen printed T shirts as there are people wearing them all holding particular sentimentality to its owners, but these designs fade over time. However, Giant Triplets has found a way to help continue the story of these garments by giving them a new lease of life with designs. Assistant editor Benjamin Austin spoke with founder Rosie Lee Wilson to find out more.
so instead of those old T shirts going into landfill, we could instead make something new with them and something with more history through reprinting it.
“We’ll take a shirt that has a print on it then we’ll create a design that goes over the top. It is supposed to create happy accidents and interesting layers and becomes more interesting through telling this story.”
The pair met in the print rooms at the University of Arts London where, with help from their tutors, they hit it off, starting Giant Triplets from there.
Rosie Wilson (centre) with members of Giant Triplets W
hat’s in a T shirt? There’s the obvious: the material, the tag, the design on the front. But symbolically a T shirt can hold memories of events, people, and times of joy. Up and down the country people wear their shirts with a printed design on the front depicting a key moment in time. Most recently the streets are filled with people adorning merchandise from the hyped Oasis reunion tour as people look to remember the occasion. It’s these shirts that we hold dear to our hearts, as we take them out and wear them over and over again, reminding us of memories they bring.
But much like memories, these T shirts can fade over time, and though they will never truly lose their aura of what they represent, the physical print could become a ghost of its former design. What if however, you could take that shirt woven with memories and give it new ones. It would bring even greater meaning to it and extend its life further, all while preventing the need for more shirts being sold; that’s where Giant Triplets comes in.
Prologue
For the last eight years Rosie Lee Wilson and co-founder Maeve O’Brien have been working under that name at festivals and other social gathering spots to help reinvigorate old T shirts. Rosie said: “We’re both obsessed with the storytelling of clothing and the history of expression through clothing. “The T shirt is the biggest symbol of that and because we were art students we were obsessed with it. “We wanted to figure out a way we could intercept this cycle
| 48 | September 2025
Rosie continued: “The name is from a Martin Luther King quote where he talks about the giant triplets of society. We were very much at university and very conceptual with it. “One of them is materialism and another is racism. We are implicit with waste and it’s the spoiling of environments we will never see so we tend to call that environmental racism. “We are very aware of how many resources go into making a
Fatboy Slim doing his own screen printing
www.printwearandpromotion.co.uk
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