The Affair

Books can inspire seismic events from war to revolution -- and who knows what they'd do if people actually bothered to read them. Keep things from getting too out of hand by wearing them instead, with The Affair.

Started by a London duo "after much beard stroking and arguing", Affair's lit-inspired t-shirts riff designs off quotes ripped from favoured novels (which are printed on the inside neck), an enterprise mandated by their "genetic loathing of dumb hip-hop references" -- so, a profound need to Forget About Dre

Sci-fi numbers see the newly-dropped Frank Herbert "Mind Killer" ("Where the fear has gone there will be nothing..."), depicting a spider crawling around in some poor guy's head, plus the huge, angular block letters of "We", from 20s novelist Yevgeny Zamyatin, who depicted "a dystopian future of absolute control, numerical identity and the subjugation of free-will" -- like 1984, but not foolish enough to specify a date

More philosophically, there's a Sartre job, putting a Parisienne Metro-style font on his quote "Hell is other people" (understandable -- he did live in France), as well as the Machiavelli-inspired "Frenemies", sporting a circle of symmetrically enmeshed black/white dots that play off his advice to "keep your friends close, and your enemies closer" -- now updated to "Make your enemies watch Closer"

Horror master H.P. Lovecraft ("A strange man, being both a racist, and terrified of seafood") has two designs: the octopus'd "Strange Aeons" (where "even death may die"), and the "Deep One", depicting the monstrous Cthulhu -- which inspired the Metallica instrumental "The Call of Ktulu", so clearly they didn't actually read the book either.