#182 Ugly & Tacky
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Not just ugly sweaters…
If you’re going to go all out with tackiness this Christmas, besides the ugly sweater you can wear matching pajamas & outrageous slippers, too.
Not just for humans, either
Everyone wants to get into the act. Dogs, cats, even dinosaurs. This animatronic T‑Rex got into the Christmas spirit at the Natural History Museum in London. See full size photo & read the article by Maria Cramer in the New York Times. Image: Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London
Who started this tradition, anyway?
The following facts are excerpted from these interesting articles:
Christmas sweaters have been around a long time, but they haven’t always been ugly
The first “official” Ugly Sweater Day was in 2002 to raise money for a friend’s cancer treatment
Ugly sweaters have been around for as fashion itself. They weren’t always made purposefully — maybe someone made a mistake in their knitting or something.
Mass market ugly sweaters made their purposeful debut in the 80s. Bill Huxtable (Bill Cosby) made them popular on The Cosby Show, then Clark Griswold (Chevy Chase) added his own twist in 1989 with National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.
Ugly sweaters went out in the 1990s until two men from Vancouver threw the first official tacky holiday sweater party to raise money for their friend’s cancer treatment. The rest is history, spreading far & wide like an ugly (but fun) fashion statement.
There’s a National Ugly Sweater Day (of course)
Every third Friday of December (December 17), people dress ugly & tacky on National Ugly Sweater Day. Read the history of this day at nationaltoday.com as well as details about these statistics:
23% of people will buy an ugly sweater
9% of people have celebrated
Uglychristmassweaters.com made $5 million
& even an Ugly Christmas Sweater store
Grandma won’t make an ugly sweater for you? Take a cyber sleigh ride to
uglychristmassweater.com
for your own personalized, custom, or off the ugly rack sweater. Be the most unfashionable guest at your next Ugly Sweater Christmas Party.
Sweaters may be ugly & tacky, but may your holidays be classy & happy
Production notes for #182 Ugly & Tacky:
Original size: 20x30 inches
Program: Adobe Illustrator
Text: Chaz just took up knitting
Ampersand: Berlin Sans (shape model for artwork)
Credits:
Illustrations: depositphotos.com (modified)
T. Rex photo: Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London
Articles:
https://www.cnn.com/style/article/ugly-christmas-jumpers/index.html
https://nationaltoday.com/national-ugly-sweater-day
Other credits as noted
Note: “&” replaces “and” in most or all text, including quotations, headlines & titles.
You may repost the image & article. Please credit AmperArt.com.
To download a full-size high-resolution 11x17-inch poster suitable for printing & framing, click on the image.
Chaz DeSimone is the creator of AmperArt and owner of Desimone Design. He was adding serifs to letters when he was just a little brat scribbling on walls. Now he’s a big brat and his entire career is design, so long as each project requires the most sophisticated, logical, captivating results. Contact him at chaz@desimonedesign.com to discuss your project, pick his brain, or just talk shop.
Who banned the ampersand?
Whoever thought up the syntax for Universal Resource Locators (URLs) was 100% coder & 0% copywriter. No foresight whatsoever. We can’t even use common punctuation in a URL except for the hyphen & underscore. It sure makes all the AmperArt URLs ugly & hard to understand—no ampersands allowed!
This is just one of the rants on my blog, chaz sez.
Rants & raves mostly about design, sometimes about the universe.
An occasional bit of useful advice.
Read the blog:
desimonedesign.com/chaz-sez
Some of these old toys could be dangerous, especially since us kids weren’t required to wear full-on body armor like helmets and knee pads back then, but there was one in particular that guaranteed blood: the beloved Flexy Racer, made by a sled manufacturer who added wheels. You rode this thing on your stomach, just a few inches from the ground. Your hands wrapped around the brake handles (which just rubbed against the skinny tires, and didn’t ever stop the thing in time). The handles also were part of a steering mechanism, but all we ever did was tilt our body left or right to make a turn. The speeds got up there on the steep streets where I lived and this was more fun than a roller coaster. This short vid gives you an idea how dangerous and fun that Flexy was:
