Project HOPE: The travelling t-shirt

We all can agree that 2020 has been a difficult year. With being stuck at home during the Covid-19 imposed lockdown, the maximum one could have travelled is to move from bedroom to their living room. But here is a t-shirt that travels and so far it has travelled all the way from Shahjahanpur to Hollywood. The t-shirt goes by the name ‘Hope’ and her pronoun is ‘She’.

This is the story of how Hope came into existence. Siddhanth Agarwal, 24, a marketing executive was sent on unpaid leave at the beginning of the lockdown. He moved back to his hometown Shahjahanpur from New Delhi to live with his parents.

As the pandemic led to lockdowns, each one of us fell into the dungeon of overthinking and the pressure to be productive. Siddhanth who found himself doing nothing for months, suffered from anxiety attack. That’s when he decided to do something with the time he had in hand.

Siddhanth began conversing with people around him and asked them one simple question- What do you miss the most during the lockdown?

To his surprise, the most common answer was travel. People missed travelling.

Although people were restricted from travelling but objects weren’t. That’s when Agarwal came up with ‘Project HOPE: The travelling t-shirt’.

Hope travels across the world. With a simple black t-shirt, Siddhant wanted to spread the message of solidarity, the message that no matter where you come from or who you are, we are all in this together.

Hope has travelled from New Delhi to Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Japan, Los Angeles and New York. Siddhanth got in touch with artists and creators around the world through social media. The only condition was to wear the t-shirt and show it around the city and document the experience through the eyes of the travelling t-shirt. The vlogs have already been shared from some of the cities on the project’s YouTube channel.

Speaking about the design etched on the project hope t-shirt — two square brackets facing each other— Siddhant says that it represents darkness and hope. “During the lockdown, I began experiencing anxiety, and then, there was positivity, the t-shirt logo reflects exactly what I was facing during that phase.”

As few people were not comfortable with the idea of wearing the same T-shirt, Siddhanth made sure the t-shirt package consisted of a metal box with stencils of Hope logo. The vloggers could paint the logo onto the black t-shirt in order to maintain hygiene and safety.

According to Siddhanth, the t-shirt represents every individual who wanted to travel in the pandemic.