We’ve all been there. It’s your last night in Vietnam after a mushroom-milkshake fuelled weekend at the Full Moon Party left you with neon-stained beachwear and a suspected STI, and now you’re in one of Hanoi’s night markets, steaming, looking for something to remember all the #goodtimes. 

After browsing the merch, you select a t-shirt which, like your hareem pants, speaks to your new energy. It reads: “BITCH PLEASE you are so fake even China denied they made you”, because if your trip has taught you one thing, it’s that bad vibes can GTFO.

In Vietnam, there’s a shirt for almost every mood. Just take a cursory scroll through @good_vietnam_shirts – the IG documenting the wildest, most bizarre tees on the market – to find one that sums yours up. The account was founded by John Mannheimer, a 25-year-old Californian writer living in Hanoi, who says he noticed the t-shirts with obscure, sometimes unfathomable phrases as soon as he arrived there. 

The slogans on the shirts come from just about anywhere: lyrics, quotes from old movies, clippings from newspaper articles, or brand names (near misses include ‘supromo’, ‘adbibas’ and ‘patamountain’), which are often muddled to the point of being impossible to categorise. The hostile-sounding ‘NEVER don’t free and easy I’M NOT A GEEK’, or perplexing ‘went to be candy pudding and I noke up this cool t -shirt’ are likely the product of “some shitty AI computer algorithm”, Mannheimer says 

A number of the t-shirts on sale appeal to what Mannheimer calls the “edgelord badass”, with slogans which read: ‘I do not fear what is unknown’ or ‘break what most be bruken’, or, for those who really give no fucks, ‘I do drugs’. Bans on cigarette ads don’t apply here, apparently, with statements like ‘cigarettes are food for broken soul’ or ‘enjoy a coke cigarette’. Light up. 

There are also tees which cater to the more melancholy, sensitive soul – s/o to the softboi – with statements like: ‘They fuck you up your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do’, ‘I trusted u and No more trust u’, or the painfully relatable ‘Netflix and Alone’.  Because you know what they always say: if you can’t talk about your problems IRL, just put them on a t-shirt. 

If you were looking for something more meta, meanwhile, there’s the very Vetements looking tee which simply states the definition of a t-shirt (‘It is normally associated with short sleeves, a round neck known as a cres neck, with no collar’, FYI). Because in this post-truth, fake news world, sometimes it’s nice to be reminded that a t-shirt really is just a t-shirt. If you were looking for enlightenment on your travels, look no further. 

@good_vietnam_shirts