A drawing of what you have and have not got

Three short bars across the upper back, none the same length, none lined up with each other. Bone white at the top left. Mid-grey below it and further right. Pale yellow lower again and further right still.

Under them, one thin white line at a constant height, running in two pieces with a clean gap between them. Two bars sit over the left piece, one over the right, and above the gap there is nothing.

What is the thin line meant to be?

The length of one film, laid out flat.

The bars above it are the parts of it anybody in the house has actually seen, each one sitting over the stretch it covers. Read together they answer a question people ask each other constantly and have no way of drawing: have you seen it? The truthful answer here is three separate pieces of yes and one large no, and a diagram gives that in a second where a sentence takes a paragraph and still sounds evasive.

Why is the absence drawn twice?

Because one drawing of it could be mistaken for a fault in the printing.

The line breaks, which says the middle of the film is missing from the copy. Then the space above the break is left empty, which says nobody caught that stretch anywhere else either — no bar was ever put there. A gap in a rule on its own is ambiguous. A gap with a deliberate vacancy above it is a statement, and the two together are what turns a mark into information.

The break also falls near the middle, which is the least forgiving place for it. A missing opening can be pieced together afterwards and a missing ending is at least an ending. A missing middle leaves two halves that refuse to join.

Why are the bars uneven and offset?

Because they are three separate occasions rather than one sitting that got interrupted.

They differ in length because different amounts got caught each time, in colour because they were different evenings under different circumstances, and they all start late — the first one begins some way in rather than at the head of the line, because nobody in this house has ever come in at the beginning. Three matching bars of equal width would draw something else entirely: one viewing chopped into thirds, which is a much less interesting thing to own.

Is there anything on this that belongs to somebody?

No text, no frame anybody could trace, no title, no face. Three bars and a broken rule identify nothing.

Films, artwork and performances are somebody's property, and they are licensable, so where a particular one is genuinely the point of the shirt the permission is part of the job rather than a reason to abandon it. Where it is not the point, an unnamed diagram says more: it describes the viewer's relationship to the thing, which nobody else has a claim on, since you are the one who did the not-seeing. Style has no owner. A work does.

Does it work for something other than a film?

It works for anything acquired in fragments rather than in one go.

A serial somebody joined three years in, a course attended in patches, a book read out of order, a band seen at the end of two sets. Something you have complete draws differently — a run that came back at the same point of every year is an unbroken line and needs a different design to be worth looking at. For two people who saw different parts of the same thing, one shirt each in two colours of bar makes a pair that only works standing together.

Isn't a record of not seeing something a strange thing to wear?

The gap is the content. A complete line is an ordinary shirt.

Middles disappear for reasons that have nothing to do with when anybody sat down: half a tape given over to somebody else's unrelated afternoon, or a stretch wound past on purpose so often that nobody remembers it straight. What survives is a version of the film that exists in one household and nowhere else, held in three pieces, with a hole in it that the wearer can describe in detail and has never filled.

Does it print well?

Yes, once the line is drawn heavier than the word hairline suggests.

Three flat inks for the bars — bone white, mid-grey, pale yellow — plus the same white for the rule, on a plum, aubergine or deep charcoal ground. The bars are simple flat rectangles and fabric handles those without argument.

The rule is the whole risk. Drawn as fine as it would be on paper it sits below the floor of the weave, breaks up along its length, and then the deliberate gap stops being legible as a gap. It wants enough weight to survive intact so that the one interruption in it reads as intentional. No box around any of it: the bars and the rule are their own edges.

How do I get one made?

Describe the diagram at JustOG — how long the line runs, where it breaks, how many bars sit above it and where they start. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the shop.

The line stops in the same place every time, and nobody in that house has any idea what happens there.