MODERN HEAVY METAL: MARKETS, PRACTICES AND CULTURES International Academic Conference 2015 174 THE METAL T-SHIRT: TRANSMEDIA STORYTELLING IN PRODUCTS Arild Berg*, Tore Gulden*, Viktor Hiort af Ornäs**, Nenad Pavel* and Vibeke Sjøvoll* *Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, Norway **Chalmers University of Technology Göteborg, Sweden Abstract Metal T-shirts represent a fusion of music, identity, and ideology. This case study approach explores the meaning of the metal T-shirt. Findings show that the metal T-shirt had several signatory functions, such as personal taste and a provocation against the general social structure. The T-shirt represented a visual identity, and it showed a mastery of a communicative act. The study demonstrates how products, such as T-shirts, are a part of transmedia story- telling in heavy metal culture. Background: The meaning in a T-shirt This paper explores how the T-shirt can have a role in everyday cultural metal practice in which music, identity, and ideology fuse into an aesthetic experi- ence. Snell and Hodgetts state that a T-shirt can be a material representation of social relations (Snell and Hodgetts, 2007). They connected this argument to studies of material culture, such as Tilley’s (Tilley, 2006), which promotes the idea that a core component of the social negotiation of a shared identity is non-verbal, that is, making, showing, using, and exchanging such objects as belts, T-shirts, and tattoos (Snell and Hodgetts, 2007). Tilley stressed the need to study various linkages between kinds of things, types of actions, and forms of sociability (Tilley, 2006, p. 71) to have an expanded understanding of mate- rial culture. There is a need for such an expanded understanding of the mate- rial culture in art practices (Berg, 2014), such as in heavy metal. Self-expression through products The heavy metal T-shirt was chosen because it is often connected with heavy metal fans as one of their possessions, and according to Belk, possessions are central to the formation of the self in terms of having, doing, and being (Belk, 2013). According to Hiort af Ornäs, things can serve as objects of admiration, but also as tools (Hjort af Ornäs, 2010). He describes how things can be more or less purposefully used to communicate something and mark group mem- bership. Things may convey certain meanings, which in their turn may provoke, excite fascinate, or leave a person indifferent. It is hence important, he claims, to try to understand how things are significant to different actors. Several other studies claim that the strong integrity of cultural icons help consumers express what they want to be (Csikszentmihalyi, 2008; Dittmar, 1992; Rompay and Ludden; Schifferstein and Zwartkruis-Pelgrim, 2008) and that products can contribute to modelling memories in people’s lives (Gulden, 2013).