This shirt has a story. This shirt has one hell of a story. In 2005 my brother, Mike, and I went to Indonesia. We went there for testing and training and rank advancement in the Merpati Putih Martial Arts.
We land in Jakarta right after 23 hours of travel from Utah, and there was a whole big debacle in customs. We were held there for quite a while, so it was even longer than 23 hours. So we get out and we’ve immediately whisked away and we kept wondering, why did they keep following us around with these big movie cameras? It turns out that we were to be the subject of a Discovery Channel documentary, which unfortunately never got made because that would have been one heck of a cool documentary. But they were following with us everywhere, and I mean, everywhere, I’ll get to that in a second.
It’s announced to us, we’re going to go to a wedding and I’m like, “Awesome, wedding. Good thing I packed zero dress clothes. This is going to be fun.” They said, “We’re going to go shopping.” I said, “Okay.” Now we trained in Indonesian martial arts, but we didn’t know a whole bunch about Indonesian culture, except for what our teacher and his wife had taught us, and a couple of other Indonesian friends who would come over as well as the contingents that came over to demonstrate by aberration, but we didn’t know much about it. So clothing styles, nada. We thought they just wear exactly what we wore here. It turns out, no.
We go to this wonderful, beautiful clothing store where they sold batik. Batik is this type of fabric. Well, some type of fabric, it’s the type of patterning that they put on the fabric that’s very unique in Indonesia and Southeast Asia. We go into this beautiful batik store, and I mean, when I talk about beautiful, every single shirt, every single pair of pants is different. There’s no, all blue, all the same. No, because in this store, all of the textiles… This is done by hand and every single flower, every single petal, every single little dot in the middle is applied by a little contraption that drops out a single, miniature drop of wax.
And so on this fabric, the blank fabric, they use this little thing and they put the wax on there, dot by dot, exactly the same over yards and yards of fabric. And then they dip the fabric in dye and pull it out and scrape off the wax, or however they get it off of there, and you come up with these beautiful ornate patterns, and then they sew them into clothes. And you can’t buy anything in the United States like it, not that I’ve ever seen, and I’ve looked.
And here’s this Discovery Channel documentary crew and they’ve got this big camera right upon us every single second, and they hand me like 10 shirts, “That one will look good. That’ll look good. That’ll look good.”
And I go to the changing room, I hang up my thing, I turn around and in the changing room with me is this big lens staring right at me. And I’m like, “Uh-uh (negative). No, no, no, no. Out, out,” and they’re like, “What?” And I’m like, “We can do this for dramatic effect. I come out of the changing room in a new set of clothes. Everybody who sees it will know what I did. You don’t need to be in here with me.”
I actually had to push this cameraman out of the changing room because they were like, “We have to be everywhere, that’s our job. Our contract is we have to go with you everywhere.” I’m like, “There are some places that don’t count as everywhere,” and they didn’t. And so that’s how I originally got this shirt, which every place I’ve ever worn in the United States has gotten just a massive amount of compliments because it’s so unique. There’s nothing else like it anywhere that I’ve seen.
And that’s my story on the way that you could get the most interesting stories from the clothes that you wear. It’s not always just about, “I got it at Nordstrom, or I got this on sale, or I bought it from Amazon.”
Sometimes they come with a really interesting tale, all of which is what makes our lives so unique. So what kind of tales are your clothes, what are they telling about what you’ve done in your life?
https://youtu.be/YDuzGEANwm4