Andy Warhol must be grinning in his grave. Three decades after he made pop art out of Campbell's soup cans, corporate logos are again being mischievously subverted. See that kid in the McDonald's baseball cap? Read between the golden arches: those letters spell marijuana. That Adidas-style T shirt? It says sadist. A designer water spelled backward becomes a state of mind (naive), and everyday motor oil (Pennzoil) turns into a hallucinogen (peyote). Same typefaces, very different messages. "There's so many corporate logos cluttering up your life," says Steve Dukich, whose Seattle band Steel Wool co-opted the Brillo-pad design for its T shirts. "This is a way to person-alize it."
Skateboarders spread this visual sampling way back in the late '80s. The fad spread among ravers, hip-hop kids and media-addicted suburban youth. At The Alley, a counterculture boutique in Chicago, one of the popular summer T shirts sports a familiar orange cereal box with a boy pouring marijuana leaves into a bowl of "Weedies." Not amused by satirical infringement on its trademark, Ford issued a cease-and-desist order last year to a line of clothing called Fuct that swiped Ford's familiar blue-and-white oval. Adidas is cracking down on underground designers who replace the company's "trefoil" logo with a pot leaf. That's OK: logo-mania will soon fade into the next big thing. Hot T's at The Alley feature serial killers, Kurt Cobain's death certificate and slogans like surf satan. Cool, dude.