The T-Shirt story started at Notting Hill carnival in 2004. Just come
from carnival & on the way to an after show freebie wearing my T-
shirt ‘Toxico’ I had bought in Brazil from Desacarto a few months b4
on my 1st visit to Brazil; when had met guy who set up on own T-shirt
business Pil and his partner and was interested in selling T-shirts
over in England. On the ground found a magazine, Black Pride, which
had an article about ‘Conscious Clothing’ which had T-shirt designs
around black panthers and like. Went to visit the guys in Camden and
they were interested in Descarto designs, and we sent through design
and text to them to use, but nothing ever came of it. Conscious
Clothing are no longer going and it just fizzled into nothing.

So on my recent 2nd trip to Brazil in April 2006 we went back to the
shop where Pil was and by chance bumped into him (as he has a day
shop working for a national bank for his sins) – he’s changed the
name of the label of Descarto; and he’d opened up a new shop full of
t-shirts that looked extremely like…those designed by Conscious
Clothing ( I even bought a shirt – the label’s called ‘Negro Blue’).
PIl pretended he barely recognised us at 1st, but eventually warmed
up when I waxed lyrical about social software, especially as he was
just about to take over running the largest website in South America.
I sent him a couple of links, including the Headshift site, and
blogged our chat – which itself got picked up on a brazilian news
site under the title ‘Brazilian Business Blogging’ between a story
about corruption and another about the first Brazilian in space. Now
it’s my hunch Pil will spot an opportunity in social software, and
exploit it…