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Idling in traffic behind bumpers sporting "OBX" stickers, Lydia Sullivan used to mistake the crest of Outer Banks, N.C., beach bums as shorthand for something else entirely.

"I thought, why would anybody put ‘obnoxious' on their big black SUV? That's what I thought it was," said Sullivan. "That's kind of funny."

Such observations about life in the Washington, D.C. suburbs led Sullivan to launch a clothing line teasing what she refers to as the "overclass," locals that prize overachievement, status, academics and doing the "snoburban" thing.

On her Web site, www.snoburbia.com, Sullivan sells alternative "OBX" T-shirts with "Obnoxious" spelled out underneath, as well as shirts proclaiming things like, "My internship is more impressive," or adorned with a vine of ivy, simply stating "I got in." She designs the shirts from her home in Kensington.

She has a series of shirts for the localphile to advertise they live in Takoma Park, Silver Spring, Potomac, "B-Town" or just MoCo, and several devoted to county high schools, elite sports like lacrosse, and hobbies like filmmaking and "thinking." Her most popular series is one with the shape of the state of Maryland, a mathematical "greater than" sign, and then the shape of Virginia. Sullivan gave in and created a Virginia is greater than Maryland T-shirt after "People had a tantrum, basically."

The shirts, and the accompanying blog where Sullivan documents quirks of the "Snoburbs," are not intended to offend, she said. Sullivan's eldest son has a tutor for his advanced placement classes; her daughter takes musical theater lessons. She is, in short, snoburban herself.

"I love it here, I wouldn't want to live anywhere else," Sullivan said, "but there's some humor here in everyday life. Perhaps people who grow up here can't see it. But I grew up in a crappy neighborhood in Appalachia, so for me this emphasis on overachieving is kind of skewed, and it brings a lot of humor."

Sullivan grew up in the poor section of Huntington, W.Va. The parent company she started for Snoburbia, Guy & Dot, is a play on Guyandotte, the neighborhood where she cut her teeth on the subject of snobbery and learned the role of being a bemused outcast.

Her parents were both PhDs and Sullivan wasn't accepted by the neighborhood kids who were mostly children of the working class. She went to school across town in the upper class neighborhood, and the kids there mocked her for where she lived.

"That really gave me a true understanding of snobbery," Sullivan said. "I'm fascinated by snobbery; I read everything I can about it. There's a snob for everything."

The fascination yields snarky observations about life in Montgomery County on her blog.

Among her fans is friend Vivienne Philbin of Kensington, who admits she sees a bit of herself in some of Sullivan's subject matter on Snoburbia.

"It's so true, it's a little irreverent in a cute sort of way," Philbin said. "I really like the shirt that says ‘Foodie' with the little hand-drawn arugula leaf. Just having it local, like the T-shirt that says ‘W-School Wunderkind,' (a reference to Walter Johnson, Walt Whitman, Thomas S. Wootton and Winston Churchill high schools) is really clever."

Her stuff may be local, but Sullivan said she was not allowed to participate in the Kensington Farmer's Market. She wrote on her blog: "Our local farmers' market would not let me in to sell my t-shirts that make fun of people who go to farmers' markets. We, my dear, are not a flea market."

"That was a good example of snoburbia right there," Sullivan laughed.