T-shirts might not be considered high art or serious business, but to local T-shirt company Threadless, they’re both. The company brought a brand-new art book and a handpicked selection of shirts to one of the city’s premier art spaces to prove it.

Threadless.com co-founder Jake Nickell signed books and talked to fans at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave., on Oct. 12 to celebrate the release of “Threadless: Ten Years of T-Shirts from the World’s Most Inspiring Online Design Community.”

The book was released as part of Threadless’s 10th anniversary celebration. It details the company’s rise from obscurity to mainstream success throughout the past decade and includes photos and illustrations of Threadless designs, as well as interviews with designers and stories of the company’s evolution as a business.

“There’s lots of T-shirts,” said Threadless Art Director Ross Zietz of the book’s contents. “There are lots of little insights into the business and how it started and how we never really expected it to do what it’s done.”

The book release is just part of a long series of events and programs Threadless has held to celebrate its 10th anniversary.

“We’ve had everything going from a countrywide tour to the book coming out to some new product lines, to some partnerships with more mainstream businesses to give our artists a new platform for that work,” said Vice President of Marketing Cam Balzer. “It’s been an incredible year, and we’re just really excited to keep growing from here.”

Nickell co-founded Threadless.com in 2000 with his friend Jacob DeHart as an extension of his involvement in an online art community. As a member of an art forum called Dreamless, Nickell asked other members to post designs online. He then went through them, selected the best ones and printed them on T-shirts.

Nickell said he did this as a hobby and as it grew in popularity, he moved it to its own dedicated website, Threadless.com. Anybody can submit a design to Threadless, and the online community votes to decide which ones are ultimately printed and sold as T-shirts.

“It was never really meant to be a business,” Nickell said. “After about two years, it got to the point where it was growing so big I was faced with the decision of, ‘should I just stop doing it, or should I quit my job and try to make it into a business?’ And that’s when things got real, I guess.”

Zietz joined Threadless five years ago, and he said the company has grown drastically since then.

“I was the ninth person hired,” Zietz said. “I was the first person hired [who] wasn’t a friend of Jake [Nickell] and Jacob [DeHart], and right now we have just under 90 employees, so it’s… still growing. We just moved into a new warehouse. It’s big, it’s fun, it’s a cool place to work. We’ve had to do some adjusting to make sure we still keep this growth but also keep our community happy.”

However, Threadless’ business side wasn’t the only part to grow and evolve throughout the past decade. The site’s artistic community has matured as well.

Nickell said the majority of Threadless’ earliest designs were much more experimental than the ones on the site today, largely due to the prevalent art styles of Dreamless forum members.

“Trends kind of come and go, and that still happens today,” Nickell said. “It’s not like we’ve developed into this specific style. If you go to Threadless.com/All, you can see every design we’ve ever printed on one page in order of how they were printed. So you can see the evolution of

the designs.”

Nickell said that while he’s pleased with the tremendous growth Threadless has experienced throughout its first 10 years, he doesn’t have any large, concrete plans moving forward.

“We’re trying not to put together too much of a plan,” Nickell said. “Because we’re so driven by our community, we want to make sure we’re working with our community on every decision we make, rather than saying, ‘In five years we want to be here, and you’re coming with us no matter what.’”

For more information about Threadless’ 10th anniversary or to purchase a copy of the Threadless book, visit Threadless.com.