About three months ago, a young and enterprising pair of UCLA students took it upon themselves to intravenously inject Armon apparel ““ I am of course speaking of the ubiquitous “Armon?!” T-shirt craze ““ into the school’s cultural milieu, and it has since been coursing through the bloodstream of Los Angeles’ tragically hip underground scene.
The question is, why? Why this Armon and why right now? I recently took it upon myself to solve this enigma by seeking out the “mon,” the myth, the legend, Armon himself. The interaction was indeed a curious one. After knocking, his door opened to reveal a man not at all in stark contrast to the image of him that has been popularly portrayed: smiling, jovial and radiant. Perhaps even iridescent.
Sitting with him that afternoon, it’s fair to say that I have never felt more at peace in my entire life. As we waxed poetic on his dilapidated living room couches (beanbag couches, no less), I became eerily entranced by his aura, my entire emotional self sated by his simple smile.
That night, as I lay in bed and reflected upon my encounter, my mind could not help but return to just one plain and simple thought: innocence. And then it clicked.
The reason for the popularity of “Armon?!” isn’t just the hipster drive to attain those things out of the ordinary. It is the desire to connect with something altogether removed and disconnected from what has become the guiding and markedly pessimistic ethos of the contemporary era.
The proverbial Armon has become something that we can all connect to ““ completely and utterly absent of all ties to a culture founded upon condescension. He provides for us an outlet to express all those hopes, feelings and dreams that the intelligentsia have come to call “naive” and has thus become our almost necessary disconnect from reality.
Armon’s persona has somehow made the jump and been perfectly translated into the apparel which people have come to know and love. His smile, which projects from the heart of every shirt, reminds us that if we just manage to look up from the gray and tattered pavement upon which we walk, we can discover a world splashing with color.
Indeed, he may now be said to be the last true bastion of light amid a fog of fetid despair. And perhaps, just perhaps, we may therein discover the true meaning of the double punctuation that graces his every neon-colored T-shirt. A question mark, for our own self-doubt, and an exclamation point, for our joyous discovery of what we once thought lost.
Wedell is a third-year political science student.