Sometimes a good way to justify purchasing an item of clothing is by inventing a mathematical formula involving the number of times said item is worn. The formula tends to go something like this: Every wear equals $10, so if it’s worn 20 times, then it was well worth that (completely unnecessary) $200. If that sounds vaguely familiar, do the math behind this one: Australian cult label Nobody has teamed up with charity:water and Ivan Kane’s Café Wa s to create a new signature “Nobody Wa S Thirsty” tee.

Screw government bailouts for automakers. Know what can save Detroit? T-shirts. Since Robert Dempster started printing T-shirts reading "Save Detroit Save America," thousands have been clamoring for his threads. Sounds like the guy can't even leave his house without getting hounded for a shirt, which is a good thing for sales, and great thing for his home town. (Shades of the classic and wildly successful post-Katrina "Defend New Orleans" T-shirt craze.) "Robert has been at a gas station filling his truck when people asked where they can get the shirt ... the bank, retail stores, UAW workers and everywhere," says a press release. "Then they follow him to his store or car to purchase them."

I love T-shirts. And these days, rather than serving merely as a method to hide my back hair from the "civilized" world, they can also be worn as a fashion statement -- or, worse yet, a geopolitical commentary. Furia, a Latin American communications firm, teamed with Levi's to create a line of five limited-edition T-shirts with some nifty designs that stand for something, you know, important. Their prints of a barb-wired bear or a screwed-up storm cloud aren't simply the product of some Pratt grad who got lucky. According to the press release, these designs "reflect over industrialization and the development in large cities." These are the first in a line of future hookups between Levi's and other design firms. Click to see more, including a bird with Eiffel Towers as feet!

Los Angeles underground artist Brandy Flower of Hit+Run Crew, on touring the world’s parties to bring art to the people, the death of the Xanax-munching, skinny jean-clad hipster, keeping up with the latest conspiracies and why his grandma thinks he’s boring.

What exactly do you do? I never learned any silkscreen technique, so for my 30th birthday, I bought a small starter kit and set it up in my kitchen. As a hobby, I started printing in my apartment and throwing small parties silk-screening on old clothes people would bring over. After I printed at a friend's backyard party in summer 2005, my college friend Mike Crivello realized that people loved checking out the screen-printing process, and he wanted to start a clothing line that used live printing as promotion. In November 2005, two months before Sony decided to move all creative services to New York, Mike and I started HIT+RUN with an event at the Blue Nile Cafe in Long Beach. Close to 200 events later, we have traveled all over the United States, to Europe and Japan, and have never had to solicit anyone to have HIT+RUN at their party.

I did it! I found the quintessential image of 2008! In a search that's taken me through the eternal galleries of Flickr to the back back ends of Google images, it took a visit to the movie blog /Film for me to come across a perfect mashup of the two most iconic figureheads of the year -- and who are opposite sides of the same coin. T-shirt designer James Lillis took Shepard Fairey's iconic Obama image (see his post-election version here) and defaced it with the equally iconic visage of Heath Ledger's Joker to make "The Audacity of Joke." Another addition to the gaggle of Joker threads, and the perfect symbol for a year where everything seemed to go horribly wrong, and yet somehow ended up, well, decent. Click through for larger version of the design.

Imagine you're a street merchant selling election paraphernalia, and you've been making bank. Well, come tomorrow, the party's over. All that clever sloganeering that pops up along the street-vendor corridor on 17th Street between Broadway and Fourth Avenue and Union Square may or may not dramatically scale back after the election. According to the New York Observer, the small army of street vendors have flooded Union Square's plaza over the past months are unsure about employment after the election. You know, because the T-shit sales business is so stable otherwise.

He really does! The native Detroit rocker is giving a little back and partnering with Wayne State University to fund a music scholarship to boost Detroit youth interest in music and, presumably, all things that rock the rust belt. His T-shirt company, "Made in Detroit," is footing the bill and rolling out limited edition tees featuring the MID tag embedded in Wayne State's logo. All the proceeds go to local kids who wanna rock. Why Wayne State? Rolling Stone has named it among the top the schools that rock. Whatever. But give it up for the Kid!

The sordid sartorial scandal continues! Pineapple Express actor James Franco told a reporter that the shark-and-kitty T-shirt he sports in the stoner flick was designed by the film's director David Gordon Green, and not a concept ripped-off from the Brooklyn T-shirt company WOWCH. "What? That's ridiculous," Franco. "We completely created that shirt and that shark. David wanted me to wear a purple Monterey Bay T-shirt with a whale on it. I said I wasn't into the whale shirt, so he came up with his own design, which was the shark." Plagiarism is a publicity goldmine, turns out.

Urban Outfitters has created an exclusive line of T-shirts called the "Beautiful Ones Superstar Raglan," which features cartoon version of Michael Jackson, David Bowie, and none other than Karl Lagerfeld. Yes, Karl has reached such pop-culture stature that he warrants beautification on a T-shirt. Lagerfeld's cult status doesn't begin and end with his high-fashion designs or his famous shades and fingerless gloves; there's also the diet book and the H&M collaboration, among other endeavors. Though not involved in the T-shirt, he's likely thrilled to grace the lithe torsos of urban hipsters.

With another $75 million at the box office (biggest second weekend ever beeotches!), The Dark Knight is something of a phenomenon. And with Heath Ledger’s rendering of the Joker now entering icon territory, I’d like to see those hollow eyes and carved smile replace Che Guevera as the symbol of manufactured revolucion. /Film has assembled a large collection of Joker T-shirts, each available for purchase online, with designs ranging from punk-rock nostalgia to copies of the film’s posters. Apologies to John Wayne Gacy, whose run as coolest murdering clown is officially over.