Not every joke makes it to print

There is humour in the Potero range. It is there because an insider joke is real currency, and it is not available from the outside. There is a limit to it because the same question is asked of every print, and a sales figure does not answer that question.

Two garments on the same rail

The range includes a hoodie called I Hate Those Damn Drones. The print is a dry statement of fact. Where drones are in the air, the thing is on your mind every day. It is a joke and it is true at the same time. It sells well.

On the same rail is the Stand With Ukraine hoodie. There is no joke in it. No wordplay and no sharpened angle. It says one thing and stops there.

Both deal with the same war. Only one of them is allowed to laugh. That is not an inconsistency. It is the same decision running in two directions.

The line is drawn by whose expense the laugh comes at

The subject does not decide it. The target does.

A drone is a piece of kit. Kit is fair game, because the first people to laugh at it are the ones who work with it. Cursing your equipment is older than any print. It belongs to the same talk as slagging off an exercise in the middle of that exercise, and neither means the thing is taken lightly.

The same goes for the rest of shared everyday life. The jabs traded between branches of service, the absurd stretches of a conscript year, and what gets said when a wet tent goes up for the third time are common property. The people who laugh at them are the people they happened to.

The people who have paid are not kit. The fallen, veterans and the civilians whose cities are being bombed sit on the other side of the line. With them we do not look for an angle. We do not look even when an angle exists and would work.

Ukraine belongs in that category entirely. The war is unfinished and it is somebody's home. Using it as the point of a print would be borrowing something that is not ours. That is why Stand With Ukraine was made without an angle, and why it stays that way for as long as it is needed.

The jokes come from the ranks

Most of the ideas that reach the range were heard somewhere else first. They come from the ranks, from courses, and from the same people who later buy them. That is the whole reason there is humour in the range at all: It already exists, and it is not invented here.

So our work is filtering, not inventing. An idea born in a meeting sounds like a meeting, and you can tell because it has to be explained. A joke that has to be explained has already failed before it is printed.

The tent test

The question is always the same, and it is asked before a print goes any further. Would someone who does this for a living laugh at it as genuine and true, or would they cringe.

Cringing is a sharper gauge than offence. Offence can be anticipated and discussed. Cringing says something else: The joke was written from the outside. It is built on how the thing looks rather than on what it is. You see it in a second, and better typography does not fix it.

The test cuts the other way too. A print that plays it too safe fails the same question, because there is nothing in it to recognise. Empty is not restrained. Restraint is settled on the surface of the garment rather than in the content of the print, and that is covered separately: The front badge is small on purpose.

Direct is allowed, fantasy is not

War and equipment are spoken of directly. It is done cold and short, not illustrated. Realism says what a thing is. Fantasy says how someone would like it to feel.

In practice that cuts more than any list of banned words. Violence as spectacle is out. Hero imagery is out. What remains is what has already happened to someone, and it is said with as little as possible.

Current politics are not printed

National defence is not a party, and it is not a position on one election issue. Day to day politics and party symbols do not enter the range, because the same garment is worn by people who vote differently and do the same thing anyway.

This is a practical reason, not a statement of principle. Nobody asks in the ranks who anyone votes for.

What this costs

The sharpest version would outsell the most restrained one almost every time. A hard joke travels, and travelling is free advertising. We know that every time an idea is left unmade.

The range would be larger and louder if the only test were whether it sells. That is not the only test. A garment stays in use for years. It is also worn in a room where the thing is true for someone right at that moment. A print that works in a feed and falls apart in that room is the wrong print.

Printed is printed. So we ask first.