Getting the Message Off Your Chest

Kuwait, the country that jailed a man for wearing a Saddam Hussein shirt, isn’t the only foreign land where Ts are considered serious business:

* Norway claims the mantle of world’s priciest T--a white cotton shirt that was auctioned off last year for a mind-boggling $3,700. No designer’s initials drove up the price; instead, it was imprinted with a clock set to a few minutes before the starting time of the country’s Lillehammer Winter Olympics.

* In Brazil, the T-shirt was king, or rather President--former President Fernando Collor de Mello made a ritual several years ago of setting off on his jog each Sunday with a new message emblazoned on his bosom. His Sunday T-shirt snagged an audience of 155 million on that traditionally slow news day.

* In China, where dissidents made their case vertically on the Democracy Wall, anti-government T-shirts were considered such a threat to the status quo two years ago that they were banned.

And, sometimes, all that shirt chatter can give way to cross-cultural chaos. Several years ago, a couple of Chinese soldiers tried to rip a Sergeant Bilko T-shirt off a British tourist because they mistook Bilko for the Dalai Lama.

That case of mistaken identity prompted writer Calvin Trillin to muse in the Nation magazine: “Which sitcom reruns are they watching in Tibet? Could the Dalai Lama actually sneak back into his country and rally his people against the Chinese if he was willing to disguise himself as Desi Arnaz?”