Every other thing you design gets put in front of people. Clothing has to be picked up and put on by someone who could have worn anything else that morning.
That consent changes what you can get away with. A poster that irritates still gets looked at; a shirt that irritates stays folded in a drawer, and the drawer is where most branded clothing quietly ends up. So it has to be something a person is willing to be seen in — not loved, just accepted enough to leave the house wearing.
Then the material argues with you. Cotton has no flat plane. The chest curves, the shoulders roll, and anything set on a straight baseline lands slightly crooked on a body. Dark fabric drinks colour and hands back something duller than you drew. And one file gets printed across every size, so a mark placed well on the small sits marooned on the biggest one. None of it is fixable in the layout — you just design knowing it happens.
Clothing is the part of a brand that walks around on its own: band merch, staff uniforms, gym kit, conference giveaways, school teams, streetwear drops. The garment varies more than the artwork does — tees, long sleeves, crewnecks, hoodies with and without zips, polos, tanks, workwear jackets — and what sits right on one arrives wrong on the next. The words move around too. An American tank top is a vest in Britain, a British jumper swallows most of what the US calls a sweatshirt, and jersey is a fabric to one trade and a football shirt to another.