Here's the TMZ report, with a photo of both shirts.
How lame to use that exact image, which wasn't perfectly drawn. I guess the idea is to get right on the line where viewers perceive a heart — and wonder why it's upside down — and then pop into the realization that it's breasts. Maybe it was clear that the effect worked on the Venice Beach shirt, and you don't want to tinker with what has proved reliable.
Of course, it's generally pretty awful to want to wear an image of breasts on your chest, but I guess it's better for Nicki Minaj fans to celebrate her body knowing that she herself is selling the shirt than it is to buy a shirt that celebrates the bodies of women on the beach who are not saying I want you to isolate and make a fuss about my breasts and who do not make any money off the shirts.
Who is supposed to want to wear these shirts — men or women? A woman wearing either of these shirts is wearing breasts over her breasts and likely to be understood to be saying hey, look at my breasts... I've got real breasts under here... think about that. A man wearing either shirt — especially the Venice Beach shirt — seems to be saying... well, it depends on how the man looks, doesn't it? I'm cycling through different mental pictures of men and getting a lot of different messages. I'll just say you'd better be awfully cute and happy looking if you wear that.
Speaking of originality, the "I [heart] X" design goes back to a trademark owned by the New York State Department of Economic Development.
The logo was designed by graphic designer Milton Glaser in 1976 in the back of a taxi and was drawn with red crayon on scrap paper. The original drawing is held in the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.I encourage you legal folk to discuss the difference between copyright and trademark in this Venice Beach/Nicki Minaj problem. I assume there's no trademark claim and that the copyright problem — if there is one — could have been avoided by drawing the shape slightly differently.
But I will go on to wonder who first got idea that a heart, flipped, looked like breasts? Ah! But here's a superseding question: Why do we have that simple ❤ shape in the first place? It doesn't look that much like the internal organ. Consider the possibility that the resemblance to breasts is the origin story for the heart shape. Here's "Ever Wondered Why The Hearts We Draw Look Nothing Like The Shape Of Real Hearts? Here’s Why":
5. It looks a pair of woman's breastsSo the heart shape looks like breasts even before you invert it and may even be the reason we have the shape in the first place. But you notice the number "5" in the explanation above. It's one of 7 ideas about why the shape has that form, including that it was a way to draw a woman's pubic mound and — all of these are inverted ❤s — the vulva, buttocks, and testicles.
The ideographic heart when inverted, is roughly triangular in shape with two round lobes occupying the base of the triangle - it is a fair supposition of a woman’s breasts pushed together probably by a corset which exaggerates the pair of breasts and narrows the waist.
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