thrillist

"It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" is literature's most timeless statement of depression -- and if you're like most men, when you're depressed, you...buy new clothes! Here to help you out, Signifying Not.

Awash in clever fairy-tale grimness, Not's the twisted t-shirt baby of a Dallas artist & classics bookworm, who took her business's name from MacBeth's grieving quote about life's ultimate worthlessness -- and he said that before the Clippers were founded. Printed with lead-free fabric ink, limited editions include nautical-macabre numbers like "Mermaid Tales" (one finned chick gorily cannibalizing another's tail) and "The Story of the Whale" (sperm species w/ exposed stomach & rib cage and Victorian-patterned pink innards), plus even more cutely torturous scenes like "Scarf Noose" (dude being hung by his) and "Fox in the Snow": a circa-1800s boy wearing a fox's head, with the decapitated carcass on the shirt's back (who's crazy like a fox now?). The founder also sells archival ink prints of select illustrations in limited series of 20, like "Walking Beard" (old-timey man in his Sunday best, w/ a curled-up fox as his whiskers) and "Two Bits" -– sharp-suited Siamese twins casually slicing each other as they groom, leaving you to assume they're not exactly livin' the Siamese dream (but at least they're not hitting each other's vital Corgans).

Not's currently branching out into oddball accessories including the "A Day With a Moustache" necklace, polyester-stuffed "creatures" like the aforementioned whale, and the "Anatomical Man Doll": a creepy, naked, van-dyke-bearded guy with a belly covered in a diagram lifted from an old medical handbook, but with a groin missing one crucial bit of anatomical correctness -- a situation so depressing, he clearly skipped clothes and went right to ice cream.

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