What does the "I❤️NY" t-shirt symbolize today?

Teyana Taylor, an American actress and singer, presented the iconic show "Saturday night live" in January dressed in an unexpected piece: a white t-shirt, completely embroidered with sequins, featuring one of the most iconic logos of the 20th century: "I❤️NY". The piece was part of Chanel's Métiers d'Art 2025/26 collection, the line with which the French house showcases its maximum artisanal virtuosity each year. This time, however, the most exquisite luxury had allied itself with one of the most kitsch objects of tourist culture: the souvenir t-shirt. The episode could have remained an anecdote if it weren't for the fact that, since then, other celebrities – especially from Generation Z – have also revived this same symbol.

The "I❤️NY" logo was created in 1977 by Milton Glaser, one of the great graphic designers of the 20th century. At a time when New York was suffering from profound international discredit due to the financial crisis, rising crime, and urban decay, Glaser conceived this slogan to help turn its image around and attract tourism. The project became one of the most paradigmatic cases of what we now know as city branding: the strategy of managing a city as a brand, exploiting its identity, symbols, and collective imagination to attract visitors, investment, and prestige. It was a way of understanding urban policy fully consistent with the neoliberal shift that was beginning to consolidate: without completely renouncing social policies, institutions were increasingly emphasizing the construction of an attractive image of the city, often trusting that the miracle of economic recovery would eventually resolve, on its own, the inequalities that had fueled the crisis. A strategy, that of city branding, which since 1992 has also determined the DNA of current Barcelona.

The slogan "I❤️NY" soon became an exportable and infinitely reproducible concept. Soon there would be "I❤️Paris", "I❤️London" and even "I❤️Benidorm" or any other city willing to turn its name into a brand. These t-shirts functioned almost like a travel certificate: upon returning to daily routine, they allowed one to display the places visited and, at the same time, a certain cultural capital. It's not very different from the ritual of filling the fridge with tourist magnets of dubious taste so that visitors can admire our degree of cosmopolitanism. However, the globalization of consumption eventually deactivated this function. The internet, large retail chains, and global trade made it possible to access any city's t-shirt without leaving our neighborhood. Today, when someone wears a city t-shirt, we no longer assume they have visited it or that it attests to a lived experience; we simply interpret that they identify with the imagery that urban brand represents.

But why are these t-shirts back in fashion fifty years later? Popular culture has an extraordinary capacity to rehabilitate what it had previously considered ridiculous. What for years symbolized the most old-fashioned tourist ends up becoming, with sufficient temporal distance, an object imbued with irony and, finally, desire. The souvenir t-shirt seems to have completed this cycle. The paradox is that its return coincides with a moment when cities – and especially their inhabitants – are suffering the consequences of the most aggressive "city branding strategies, with runaway tourism threatening to erase any form of indigenous life.

However, the return of this t-shirt also allows for a political reading. If in 1977 Milton Glaser conceived it to help New York emerge from darkness and regain self-confidence, today its resurgence seems to take on a new meaning. In the midst of Trump's presidency, the city – with the election of Democrat Zohran Mamdani as mayor – has become one of the great bastions of opposition. At a time when dissenting voices are exposed to reprisals, wearing an apparently innocent t-shirt can become a discreet, but unequivocal, way of taking sides. Perhaps, half a century later, that heart is trying to rescue New York again, but this time from the political drift of the United States.