Don’t Smile So Much. It Makes You Stupid – T-Shirt

Today, Tokyo Fashion is launching a new feature which we’re calling “Japanese T-Shirt of the Week”. The idea is that each week we’ll share with you a Japanese t-shirt that has caught our attention – either because it’s cool, funny, unbelievable, or any combination of the above. When possible, we’ll even try to give you a link to where you can buy the shirts. In reality, the odds of us actually updating this feature every week are pretty low, but we figured why not be optimistic? :-)

Our first “Japanese T-Shirt of the Week” is one that caught our eye at Summer Sonic last weekend in Tokyo. An enthusiastic Japanese girl near us was dancing to the music of the French band Phoenix. She was wearing a cute t-shirt with ice cream cones and cake on the front…

Pretty typical cute Japanese t-shirt, right? You’d think so, but not really! As this cute girl danced around to Phoenix, she spun around and we got a glimpse of the back of her shirt…

On the back of the shirt it says in HUGE text, “Don’t Smile So Much. It Makes You Stupid. What’s that about? What designer thought that an image of cute sweets on the front, and a mean message like that on that back, was a good idea? Then again, we thought it was pretty cute, especially when worn by a smiling, happy, dancing Japanese girl.

We did some research after getting home from Summer Sonic and the shirt is produced by the popular Japanese girl’s clothing brand RNA. In case black isn’t your color, the shirt comes in yellow, white, and even pink.

The only place online that we could find where you can buy this t-shirt is at a Japanese clothing shop called Born Free. The price is about US$35 and it’s only available in Japanese size M.