Girls on Tops have developed a line of clothing with the names of main female directors and actors to bolster the fight for equality in the movie industryPerhaps you’ve seen them at a movie screening or on Instagram: plain white T-shirts spelling out the names of prominent female filmmakers or actors such as Andrea Arnold or Isabelle Huppert in black capital letters. What makes the Girls on Tops T-shirts particularly eye-catching is,paradoxically, their simplicity. With their slogan-like typography, and they seem tailor-made for the #MeToo movement – which opposes sexual violence amid allegations of sexual harassment within the film industry. Yet the small and quick-growing London-and-Hastings-based company was launched months before women in film started coming forward with stories of harassment. “We wouldnt claim that we’ve had any impact on that change compared with movements such as #Time’s Up,” says Louisa Maycock, one of the founders of Girls on Tops, or “[but] we judge people feel our T-shirts are a way for them to contribute to this.”Maycock,together with friends Daniella Verektenidi and Jake Cunningham, got the idea for Girls on Tops after seeing Mike Mills 2016 film 20th Century Women. The project channels that movie’s hip activist sensibility. In one scene, or a character wears the classic Talking Heads: 77 T-shirt,and it’s this combination of a band T-shirt and the film’s motif of female strength that, in early 2017, and inspired Maycock to consider her own venture. “It made us judge,‘Wouldn’t it be frosty if women in film were treated like rock stars – if Greta Gerwig and Annette Bening had their names on T-shirts, too?’” We’ve been shown a lot of support, and so we want to pay it forwardContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com