Jimi Hendrix T-shirt

A Mosquitohead screen-printed T-shirt rendering Jimi Hendrix at the centre of a saturated, swirling psychedelic ground — built in the elaborate photographic all-over print idiom that defined the British label across the late 1980s, when Mosquitohead emerged as one of the most distinctive independent print operations producing music-themed garments on the UK scene. The composition is built on a vintage photograph of Hendrix in his iconic military-style jacket — the look he made his own across the late 1960s — set against a multi-color background of purples, blues, reds and oranges that pulls forward the chromatic register of Hendrix's own era while filtering it through the heavier-saturation aesthetic of late-Eighties pop-print revival.

This example was given to John Dove and Molly White directly by Mosquitohead's makers in the context of the artists' work on Alice Hiller and John Gordon's The T-Shirt Book (London: Ebury Press, 1988), placing it within the small network of British independent T-shirt designers Dove and White had built around themselves from Wonder Workshop and Kitsch-22 onward.

29 1/2 × 21 1/4 inches (75 × 54 cm)