New York City-based Kat Viana is a blogger and embroidery artist who has taken it upon herself to embroider men’s misogynistic comments about their dating life onto ready-to-wear T-shirts. Most of the quotes she has embroidered come from first-hand accounts of the women these men were seeing. With a serious tone, they’ve been heard to exchange laughable quotes such as “No, you are the other woman” and “No, we are not dating, but if you sleep with anyone else we are breaking up.” These comments are excuses for infidelity and sometimes even downright abuse.
By putting these quotes on display on T-shirts, Viana highlights power imbalances that characterise heterosexual relationships in a patriarchal society. Viana’s T-shirts help anyone who reads them examine their relationships and those around them. The hope is they will make them see the inherent sexism behind these comments and aim to remodel today’s patriarchal society that has created power imbalances within relationships. This is in the hope that they can prevent them in the future and reflect the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal of Gender Equality.
Kat Viana creates her T-shirts by first crafting her designs on her phone. She then wirelessly hooks it up to her stitching machine, which will then begin to embroider the design. This process allows her to quickly make T-shirts out of men’s comments, especially if she hears them on the go. It allows her to preserve the emotional intensity of the comment and to dub her tagline as “Don’t say dumb sh*t around me or it’ll end up on a shirt.”
A study by Marquette University found that sexism and gendered power allow cis men to approve of uncommitted sexual relationships. Hence, the existence of comments such as the ones Viana has embroidered on her T-shirts. Viana’s T-shirts have been especially popular with women, with videos of the stories behind the comments reaching up to 2.2 million viewers on Instagram. This is a sign of the sheer number of women who find the comments and experiences to be mirrors of their own.
At the end of the day, Viana’s embroidered T-shirts encourage introspection and dialogue around gender equality in today’s dating scene and contemporary relationships. They become powerful call-to-actions for societal transformation so that romantic relationships can be free from the shackles of patriarchal power imbalances.
Find out more about these embroidered T-shirts and Kat Viana’s other pieces by checking her Instagram on @bykatviana.