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MiFellaโs shirts show how 20th and 21st century subcultures (from Futurist noise to geopolitical memes) are recycled, weaponised and worn as signs of identity in the age of PFPs
Each shirt trait tells its own story. Some are direct pulls from music or fashion. Others are deep cuts from noise, anime, or meme culture. Together they form an archive of references that anchor MiFella in a broader cultural web.
Let's break down a few... tracing their origins, why they matter and how they shape the MiFella ethos, setting the stage for the Avant Gay...
Let's begin with the lineage of noise and experimental music. A thread that runs deep through the collection.
๐ด ๐ด๐๐๐๐๐๐
๐๐พ Merzbow is the alias of Masami Akita, who chose the name in reference to Kurt Schwittersโ Merzbau (Schwittersโ architectural collages built from found materials. Image 2). The link is symbolic: Akita channels a similar ethos of transforming detritus into art, but in the sonic domain.
๐๐พ Masami Akitaโs project drew from an eclectic range of influences. Progressive rock, heavy metal, free jazz, early electronics, but also Dadaism, Surrealism and fetish culture. That same unruly mix of high and low, avant-garde and subcultural, runs through MiFella.
๐๐พ His methods were pure overload: distortion, feedback, junk metal, home-made instruments, collapsing structure under sheer volume. The DNA of traitmaxxing lies here. Excess as principle, noise as revelation.
One of my favourite traits is the Merzbow Overlay ๐ค๐พ Read about it here ๐๐พ
๐ท๐๐๐๐
๐๐๐๐
Derived from Pulse Demon, a 1996 album by Japanese noise musician Merzbow. The original cover art is a field of warped, hypnotic lines... a visual representation of noise. In MiFella, that optical distortion is placed directly over the entire
๐ฏ ๐ณ๐๐๐๐ ๐น๐๐๐๐๐๐
๐๐พ Luigi Russolo (1885โ1947) was an Italian Futurist who wrote The Art of Noises (1913), a manifesto declaring that the limited circle of pure sounds must be broken open by the roar of modern life.
๐๐พ He built the Intonarumori, experimental noise machines designed to mimic the crashes, scrapes and hisses of the industrial city.
๐๐พ For Russolo, noise was not a defect but the future of art. A way to mirror the speed, conflict and intensity of modern existence.
๐๐พ In MiFella, the Luigi Russolo shirt trait encodes this origin story: the leap from harmony to fracture, from melody to machinery. A reminder that the collection doesnโt just cite noise... It wears the moment noise first became art.
โ ๐ฒ2 ๐ช๐๐๐๐๐
๐๐พ References Metal Language (1998), a limited cassette by Japanese noise artist K2 (Kimihide Kusafuka), recorded live at Oncosonik Laboratory.
๐๐พ K2โs work is defined by scrap metal and found-object sound: crashing, scraping, unpredictable textures stitched with electronics. His practice turns industrial debris into a vocabulary of harsh noise.
๐๐พ The cassette itself was a hand-numbered edition, underscoring scarcity and the collectorโs aura... qualities mirrored in MiFellaโs trait economy.
๐๐พ In MiFella, the K2 shirt translates this ethos: noise as metal, structure as wreckage, rebirth from industrial ruins. A custom signal that even the rawest fragments can be pressed into new codes.
๐ ๐ซ๐๐๐๐ ๐บ๐๐๐๐๐
๐๐พ Refers to Hanatarash, the notorious Japanese noise project founded by Yamantaka Eye (later of Boredoms) in 1983.
๐๐พ The name means โsnot-nosedโ... a clue to its reckless, chaotic spirit. In live shows, Hanatarash became infamous for using drills, bulldozers and heavy machinery as instruments. Many times causing real physical danger.
๐๐พ Their 1988 album Hanatarash 2 is often remembered for its dizzying, abrasive sound and hypnotic concentric cover design (visualised here on the shirt as a spiralling neon target).
๐๐พ In MiFella, the Death Spiral shirt captures this ethos of extremity: danger as performance, collapse as spectacle. It channels the anarchic energy of a band that turned destruction itself into art.
๐บ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐
๐๐พ References Stalingrad, a hardcore punk band from Bradford, UK, whose 1997 demo used a photograph from Susan Lipperโs Grapevine series.
๐๐พ Lipperโs work straddled documentary and fiction: staging ambiguous, often unsettling images in rural Appalachia that force viewers to question stereotypes and their own preconceptions.
๐๐พ The chosen photo (a deer strung on a basketball hoop) collapses sport, violence and absurdity into a single surreal tableau.
๐๐พ In MiFella, the Stalingrad shirt imports this double lineage: the raw, abrasive energy of UK punk and Lipperโs eerie Appalachian collaborations. Together they point to MiFellaโs core method... recontextualising fragments of subculture and trauma into myth.
Some traits nod to Anime and Anime culture...
๐ค ๐บ๐๐๐๐๐ ๐ฌ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐ณ๐๐๐ (๐ฉ๐๐๐๐) ๐บ๐๐๐๐
๐๐พ References Serial Experiments Lain (1998), the cult anime series that explored consciousness, technology, and identity in the early days of the wired internet.
๐๐พ The show follows Lain Iwakura, a schoolgirl drawn deeper into โThe Wiredโ. A networked reality where the boundaries between self and system dissolve.
๐๐พ With its fragmented narrative and eerie cyber-aesthetics, Lain probed questions of simulation, isolation and what it means to exist inside information systems.
๐๐พ In MiFella, the Lain shirt acts as an eery reminder that identity here is always wired, always unstable. A place where self, image and network bleed together.
Many MiFella traits read as a nod to art historyโs most charged, controversial gestures. Moments when artists tested the limits and rewrote the terms of what art could be.
๐ฝ๐๐๐ ๐จ๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐บ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐
๐๐พ References Vito Acconciโs performance Seedbed (1972), one of the most provocative pieces of early body and conceptual art. For three weeks at the Sonnabend Gallery in New York, Acconci lay hidden beneath a wooden ramp in the gallery floor, masturbating while speaking his fantasies about the visitors who walked above him. His murmured monologue was broadcast into the space through speakers.
๐๐พ Seedbed broke the boundary between private desire and public performance. It turned the viewer into an unwitting participant. Acconci used his own body as both medium and transmitter, collapsing distance between art, artist and audience.
๐๐พ The trait signals a key thread in MiFellaโs cultural DNA: fascination with transgressive acts that expose hidden currents... whether noise in music, propaganda in politics, or desire in the gallery. Itโs a reminder that the project often draws on art-historical precedents for testing the limits of spectatorship, authorship and exposure.
From avant-garde ruptures in art history, MiFella pivots to the equally unstable theatre of geopolitical irony, where propaganda, parody and meme culture collide.
๐ด๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐ ๐ซ๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐ป
๐๐พ References the infamous closing credit of Rambo III (1988), which dedicated the film to the โbrave Mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan.โ
๐๐พ Once a straightforward Cold War gesture, it later became an emblem of geopolitical irony: today read as naรฏve, misplaced, even tragic.
๐๐พ In MiFella, the shirt weaponises that historical meme, collapsing cinema, propaganda and hindsight into a single line of text.
๐๐พ Itโs less about heroism than about how meaning mutates: yesterdayโs freedom fighters, todayโs enemies.
This shirt is an example of history fed back through the cultural shredder... propaganda turned parody, sincerity recycled into meme. It shows how MiFella doesnโt just borrow images but exposes the instability of their meaning. In the next section, Iโll expand this into a broader theme of geopolitical irony that runs through the collection.
๐ฎ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐ฐ๐๐๐๐
Already introduced in the previous section, The Mujahideen Dedication T serves as an entry point to a larger pattern. Its irony isnโt isolated. Itโs part of a cluster where MiFella repeatedly returns to Mujahideen and al-Qaeda imagery. Taken together, these traits map out a broader theme of geopolitical irony, where propaganda, parody and meme culture converge:
๐๐พ ๐ด๐๐๐
Directly references Mujahideen fighters. Militant garb and ammo belts. Once celebrated as icons of resistance, here theyโre rendered as pixel iconography, stripped of ideology and worn as myth.
๐๐พ ๐บ๐๐๐๐ ๐ท๐๐๐ ๐ฉ๐๐ ๐ณ๐๐ ๐๐ & ๐บ๐๐๐๐ ๐ท๐๐๐ ๐จ๐ ๐ธ๐๐๐๐
Draws on South Parkโs Osama bin Laden Has Farty Pants (2001), where terror was processed through slapstick parody.
๐๐พ ๐จ๐๐๐ ๐ ๐๐ ๐๐ ๐บ๐๐๐๐
The infamous meme-mashup: Adidas three stripes retooled as the Twin Towers, branded โalqaida.โ A pure artefact of early internet dark humour, collapsing corporate branding and global trauma into a forbidden logo.
Together, this cluster of traits form a mini-archive inside MiFella. They trace the arc of how jihadist imagery has circulated through Western culture:
โFrom heroic freedom fighters (Rambo)
โTo geopolitical villains (Bin Laden, al-Qaeda)
โTo internet parody and meme detournement (South Park, Aladdidas).
This is MiFella at its sharpest: showing how images migrate, meanings flip, history itself becomes schizocode. The collection leans hard into Mujahideen and al-Qaeda references, IMHO, because they are one of the clearest examples of how culture metabolises even terror and tragedy into repeatable, remixable signs.
What results is not a history lesson but a mirror of cultural absurdity: geopolitics as meme, propaganda as parody, terror as JPEG.
๐ช๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐
The shirts Iโve highlighted, from Merzbow and Luigi Russolo to Stalingrad, Hanatarash, Lain and the Mujahideen cluster, are only a slice of what MiFella offers. There are many more traits still to be unpacked, each with their own rabbit holes of noise, subculture, parody and politics.
What binds them isnโt just reference-spotting, but the way they cut across time and meaning. MiFella thrives on instability: noise as art, propaganda as parody, trauma as meme. It doesnโt just archive culture; it scrambles and replays it until new signals emerge. The blueprint for the Avant Gay.
@MifellaM
has done a great job sharing insights into lots of other traits. Check out some other shirt traits here:
Another Whitehouse one because yes
Piece now
Burzum
Prurient
Aube (by @MMifella)
MiFellaโs shirts show how 20th and 21st century subcultures (from Futurist noise to geopolitical memes) are recycled, weaponised and worn as signs of identity in the age of PFPs
Each shirt trait tells its own story. Some are direct pulls from music or fashion. Others are deep cuts from noise, anime, or meme culture. Together they form an archive of references that anchor MiFella in a broader cultural web.
Let's break down a few... tracing their origins, why they matter and how they shape the MiFella ethos, setting the stage for the Avant Gay...
Let's begin with the lineage of noise and experimental music. A thread that runs deep through the collection.
๐ด ๐ด๐๐๐๐๐๐
๐๐พ Merzbow is the alias of Masami Akita, who chose the name in reference to Kurt Schwittersโ Merzbau (Schwittersโ architectural collages built from found materials. Image 2). The link is symbolic: Akita channels a similar ethos of transforming detritus into art, but in the sonic domain.
๐๐พ Masami Akitaโs project drew from an eclectic range of influences. Progressive rock, heavy metal, free jazz, early electronics, but also Dadaism, Surrealism and fetish culture. That same unruly mix of high and low, avant-garde and subcultural, runs through MiFella.
๐๐พ His methods were pure overload: distortion, feedback, junk metal, home-made instruments, collapsing structure under sheer volume. The DNA of traitmaxxing lies here. Excess as principle, noise as revelation.
One of my favourite traits is the Merzbow Overlay ๐ค๐พ Read about it here ๐๐พ
๐ท๐๐๐๐
๐๐๐๐ Derived from Pulse Demon, a 1996 album by Japanese noise musician Merzbow. The original cover art is a field of warped, hypnotic lines... a visual representation of noise. In MiFella, that optical distortion is placed directly over the entire
๐ฏ ๐ณ๐๐๐๐ ๐น๐๐๐๐๐๐
๐๐พ Luigi Russolo (1885โ1947) was an Italian Futurist who wrote The Art of Noises (1913), a manifesto declaring that the limited circle of pure sounds must be broken open by the roar of modern life.
๐๐พ He built the Intonarumori, experimental noise machines designed to mimic the crashes, scrapes and hisses of the industrial city.
๐๐พ For Russolo, noise was not a defect but the future of art. A way to mirror the speed, conflict and intensity of modern existence.
๐๐พ In MiFella, the Luigi Russolo shirt trait encodes this origin story: the leap from harmony to fracture, from melody to machinery. A reminder that the collection doesnโt just cite noise... It wears the moment noise first became art.
โ ๐ฒ2 ๐ช๐๐๐๐๐
๐๐พ References Metal Language (1998), a limited cassette by Japanese noise artist K2 (Kimihide Kusafuka), recorded live at Oncosonik Laboratory.
๐๐พ K2โs work is defined by scrap metal and found-object sound: crashing, scraping, unpredictable textures stitched with electronics. His practice turns industrial debris into a vocabulary of harsh noise.
๐๐พ The cassette itself was a hand-numbered edition, underscoring scarcity and the collectorโs aura... qualities mirrored in MiFellaโs trait economy.
๐๐พ In MiFella, the K2 shirt translates this ethos: noise as metal, structure as wreckage, rebirth from industrial ruins. A custom signal that even the rawest fragments can be pressed into new codes.
๐ ๐ซ๐๐๐๐ ๐บ๐๐๐๐๐
๐๐พ Refers to Hanatarash, the notorious Japanese noise project founded by Yamantaka Eye (later of Boredoms) in 1983.
๐๐พ The name means โsnot-nosedโ... a clue to its reckless, chaotic spirit. In live shows, Hanatarash became infamous for using drills, bulldozers and heavy machinery as instruments. Many times causing real physical danger.
๐๐พ Their 1988 album Hanatarash 2 is often remembered for its dizzying, abrasive sound and hypnotic concentric cover design (visualised here on the shirt as a spiralling neon target).
๐๐พ In MiFella, the Death Spiral shirt captures this ethos of extremity: danger as performance, collapse as spectacle. It channels the anarchic energy of a band that turned destruction itself into art.
๐บ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐
๐๐พ References Stalingrad, a hardcore punk band from Bradford, UK, whose 1997 demo used a photograph from Susan Lipperโs Grapevine series.
๐๐พ Lipperโs work straddled documentary and fiction: staging ambiguous, often unsettling images in rural Appalachia that force viewers to question stereotypes and their own preconceptions.
๐๐พ The chosen photo (a deer strung on a basketball hoop) collapses sport, violence and absurdity into a single surreal tableau.
๐๐พ In MiFella, the Stalingrad shirt imports this double lineage: the raw, abrasive energy of UK punk and Lipperโs eerie Appalachian collaborations. Together they point to MiFellaโs core method... recontextualising fragments of subculture and trauma into myth.
Some traits nod to Anime and Anime culture...
๐ค ๐บ๐๐๐๐๐ ๐ฌ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐ณ๐๐๐ (๐ฉ๐๐๐๐) ๐บ๐๐๐๐
๐๐พ References Serial Experiments Lain (1998), the cult anime series that explored consciousness, technology, and identity in the early days of the wired internet.
๐๐พ The show follows Lain Iwakura, a schoolgirl drawn deeper into โThe Wiredโ. A networked reality where the boundaries between self and system dissolve.
๐๐พ With its fragmented narrative and eerie cyber-aesthetics, Lain probed questions of simulation, isolation and what it means to exist inside information systems.
๐๐พ In MiFella, the Lain shirt acts as an eery reminder that identity here is always wired, always unstable. A place where self, image and network bleed together.
Many MiFella traits read as a nod to art historyโs most charged, controversial gestures. Moments when artists tested the limits and rewrote the terms of what art could be.
๐ฝ๐๐๐ ๐จ๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐บ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐
๐๐พ References Vito Acconciโs performance Seedbed (1972), one of the most provocative pieces of early body and conceptual art. For three weeks at the Sonnabend Gallery in New York, Acconci lay hidden beneath a wooden ramp in the gallery floor, masturbating while speaking his fantasies about the visitors who walked above him. His murmured monologue was broadcast into the space through speakers.
๐๐พ Seedbed broke the boundary between private desire and public performance. It turned the viewer into an unwitting participant. Acconci used his own body as both medium and transmitter, collapsing distance between art, artist and audience.
๐๐พ The trait signals a key thread in MiFellaโs cultural DNA: fascination with transgressive acts that expose hidden currents... whether noise in music, propaganda in politics, or desire in the gallery. Itโs a reminder that the project often draws on art-historical precedents for testing the limits of spectatorship, authorship and exposure.
From avant-garde ruptures in art history, MiFella pivots to the equally unstable theatre of geopolitical irony, where propaganda, parody and meme culture collide.
๐ด๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐ ๐ซ๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐ป
๐๐พ References the infamous closing credit of Rambo III (1988), which dedicated the film to the โbrave Mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan.โ
๐๐พ Once a straightforward Cold War gesture, it later became an emblem of geopolitical irony: today read as naรฏve, misplaced, even tragic.
๐๐พ In MiFella, the shirt weaponises that historical meme, collapsing cinema, propaganda and hindsight into a single line of text.
๐๐พ Itโs less about heroism than about how meaning mutates: yesterdayโs freedom fighters, todayโs enemies.
This shirt is an example of history fed back through the cultural shredder... propaganda turned parody, sincerity recycled into meme. It shows how MiFella doesnโt just borrow images but exposes the instability of their meaning. In the next section, Iโll expand this into a broader theme of geopolitical irony that runs through the collection.
๐ฎ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐ฐ๐๐๐๐
Already introduced in the previous section, The Mujahideen Dedication T serves as an entry point to a larger pattern. Its irony isnโt isolated. Itโs part of a cluster where MiFella repeatedly returns to Mujahideen and al-Qaeda imagery. Taken together, these traits map out a broader theme of geopolitical irony, where propaganda, parody and meme culture converge:
๐๐พ ๐ด๐๐๐
Directly references Mujahideen fighters. Militant garb and ammo belts. Once celebrated as icons of resistance, here theyโre rendered as pixel iconography, stripped of ideology and worn as myth.
๐๐พ ๐บ๐๐๐๐ ๐ท๐๐๐ ๐ฉ๐๐ ๐ณ๐๐ ๐๐ & ๐บ๐๐๐๐ ๐ท๐๐๐ ๐จ๐ ๐ธ๐๐๐๐
Draws on South Parkโs Osama bin Laden Has Farty Pants (2001), where terror was processed through slapstick parody.
๐๐พ ๐จ๐๐๐ ๐ ๐๐ ๐๐ ๐บ๐๐๐๐
The infamous meme-mashup: Adidas three stripes retooled as the Twin Towers, branded โalqaida.โ A pure artefact of early internet dark humour, collapsing corporate branding and global trauma into a forbidden logo.
Together, this cluster of traits form a mini-archive inside MiFella. They trace the arc of how jihadist imagery has circulated through Western culture:
โFrom heroic freedom fighters (Rambo)
โTo geopolitical villains (Bin Laden, al-Qaeda)
โTo internet parody and meme detournement (South Park, Aladdidas).
This is MiFella at its sharpest: showing how images migrate, meanings flip, history itself becomes schizocode. The collection leans hard into Mujahideen and al-Qaeda references, IMHO, because they are one of the clearest examples of how culture metabolises even terror and tragedy into repeatable, remixable signs.
What results is not a history lesson but a mirror of cultural absurdity: geopolitics as meme, propaganda as parody, terror as JPEG.
๐ช๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐
The shirts Iโve highlighted, from Merzbow and Luigi Russolo to Stalingrad, Hanatarash, Lain and the Mujahideen cluster, are only a slice of what MiFella offers. There are many more traits still to be unpacked, each with their own rabbit holes of noise, subculture, parody and politics.
What binds them isnโt just reference-spotting, but the way they cut across time and meaning. MiFella thrives on instability: noise as art, propaganda as parody, trauma as meme. It doesnโt just archive culture; it scrambles and replays it until new signals emerge. The blueprint for the Avant Gay.
@MifellaM
has done a great job sharing insights into lots of other traits. Check out some other shirt traits here:
Another Whitehouse one because yes
Piece now
Burzum
Prurient
Aube (by @MMifella)
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