Before it became shorthand for the city itself, “I ♥ NY” launched as a campaign in a bold attempt to rebrand a city in crisis. In the late 1970s, New York teetered on the edge: bankrupt and burned out. Milton Glaser sketched the now-iconic logo in the back of a taxi, aiming to salvage tourism¹. But the image—a red heart and three black letters—did more than sell the city. It stood in for grit, pride, and reinvention. After 9/11, it returned with a bruise on the heart and the tagline “More Than Ever,” absorbing grief into design². By then, the logo had shed its role as a campaign and taken on cultural mythology: resilient, exportable, and easy to replicate.
Over time, its sharpness dulled. “I ♥ NY” became a symbol, souvenir, and meme. It circulated through airports, Instagram feeds, and fast fashion racks. It stood for a place, but also for the idea of loving a place—a kind of performative affection available to anyone with a tourist’s gaze.
Global variations helped push the logo from civic branding into meme territory. Robin Williams wore an Arabic version³. Others appeared in Korean, Hebrew, and even emoji⁴. The structure held, but the meaning flexed. The logo became a visual template: adaptable, exportable, and endlessly reproduced. Years of overuse had dulled its impact. The logo had become more meme than message—circulated, repurposed, emptied.
However, in 2024, photographer Mikayla “Swiper” Delson released “I ♥ Pinays,” a design that reworked a known format to name a people, not a place. Styled in the same serif font and often printed on baseball-style raglan tees, the design doesn’t just echo nostalgia—it interrogates it. What does it mean to love Pinays? To name that love in public? To take a symbol of American civic pride and fill it with diasporic affection?
“I ♥ Pinays” doesn’t register as parody. It feels like a memory, stylized. A remix built from what once shaped us, lifting visual codes from the brand capital of the world and turning them inward. With affection. With irony. Sometimes both at once.
The power of “I ♥ NY” lies in its simplicity. It doesn’t ask much—just affection. But affection, when shaped through design, becomes architecture: the stacked serif letters, the red heart, the negative space between person and place. It became more than a logo. After 9/11, it transitioned from a tourism campaign to a symbol of survival².
Resonance follows a similar aesthetic logic. It lives in vintage sportswear: raglan sleeves, varsity lettering, the soft fade of cotton after repeated wear. These design details evoke a broader visual language rooted in team sports, suburban leisure, and early streetwear. The raglan tee, in particular, functions as a kind of uniform—for athletes, for mall culture, for garage bands, and public school hallways. It signaled affiliation, not just style. To wear one signaled something else: belonging, even if unspoken.
That’s what makes its reappearance in “I ♥ Pinays” feel so precise. The shirt doesn’t just nod to “I ♥ NY.” It draws from the textures and shortcuts of American belonging: the mall tee, the field uniform, the everyday garment that shaped how we moved through space. It takes all of that and tilts it just enough to say something new.
“I ♥ Pinays” reads like an inside reference, layered with memory, context, and intent. Take the 1998 girl group Pinay—one of the first Filipina American R&B acts to put the word front and center⁵. Their brief but visible presence on MTV’s The Grind and Bay Area radio signaled that “pinay” could mean something other than stereotype. It could mean voice, sisterhood, and visibility.
In the years that followed, “pinay” threaded itself through Tumblr moodboards, Xeroxed zines, and heat-pressed tees—a quiet but persistent thread of self-naming that “I ♥ Pinays” now carries forward. The shirt borrows the template of the American tee—part souvenir, part slogan—but redirects the message inward.
Filipino Americans have long reworked dominant visual codes into something more personal and meaningful. Bootleg Louis Vuitton wallets, knockoff BAPE hoodies swapped between cousins, bamboo earrings etched with Tagalog nicknames—these weren’t just fashion choices. They were modes of adaptation. Ways to occupy space in cultures that rarely made room. “I ♥ Pinays” fits within that continuum but pushes it further. It doesn’t just remix aesthetics—it makes affection visible. Who gets to be loved? Who gets to be named? Who controls how that name circulates?
More than graphic design, this is a cultural assertion. A way to reclaim authorship over the symbols that shape us. A shift in the gaze.
In the early 2000s, “pinay” sat in a complicated space—part pride, part projection. It appeared in party flyers, chat rooms, and usernames. The culture hadn’t yet learned how to hold that complexity, so the word held it for us. Still, it found clarity at the margins—in zines, on community radio, in independent film. Heidi Tuason’s Pinay Speaks (2014) captured how artists and organizers used the term as both mirror and tool⁶. Films like American Adobo (2002) gave it quiet presence, spoken in passing, stitched into what characters wore⁷.