T-Shirt - I'll Be Seeing You - White

Military iconography has always operated by compression — the reduction of a complex experience into a single image or phrase that can be read immediately and carried easily. The best examples are neither decorative nor propagandistic in the conventional sense. They are documents: evidence of what a specific group of people chose to represent themselves with at a particular moment, under particular conditions. That choice, more than the image itself, is what makes them worth reproducing.

Buzz Rickson's, the replica division of Toyo Enterprise in Tokyo, has been reproducing WWII-era American military garments and insignia for three decades. Their graphic T-shirt programme captures the imagery — nose art, squadron insignia, wartime phrases — and reproduces it as screen prints on heavyweight cotton built to the original GI specification. The result is not a souvenir. It is a reproduction of a specific piece of wartime iconography, placed on a garment built by the same method as the original.

'I'll Be Seeing You' was a song written in 1938 and released before the war began. It became something different between 1941 and 1945 — a phrase passed at departures, played at dances before embarkation, broadcast across the home front. Its use as military iconography reflects the way that wartime gave ordinary sentiment a different weight: a song about longing became a phrase about uncertainty, about distance, about the interval between departure and return. Buzz Rickson's reproduction of it here is a reproduction of that meaning as much as that image.

The base garment is Buzz Rickson's standard heavyweight cotton tube-knit jersey — ribbed set-in collar, lockstitched seaming throughout, short sleeves with hemmed cuffs. Lot No. BR79502. Made in Japan by Toyo Enterprise.

In white, the phrase reads as statement rather than decoration. The colour carries nothing extra. Lot No. BR79502. Made in Japan by Toyo Enterprise.

• Buzz Rickson's reproduction WWII military graphic T-shirt
• Screen-printed graphic
• Heavyweight cotton tube-knit construction
• Ribbed set-in crew neck
• Short sleeves with hemmed cuffs
• Lockstitched seaming throughout
• Made in Japan

100% cotton. Heavyweight tube-knit jersey. Lot No. BR79502. Made in Japan.

• Machine wash cold
• Do not tumble dry
• Iron on reverse if required
• Made in Japan