You can also check out the books Rap Tees or Vintage T-Shirts for some cool photos and history.īut if you need further incentive, please know that the global t-shirt economy is one of the most wasteful and exploitative on Earth. There’s a lot of awesome, timeless content there. If you want to learn more about the world of vintage t-shirt collecting, I recommend exploring the Defunkd Vintage T-Shirt Collective. I’m hoping this guide can help you take the leap. They offer styles and stories and fits as various their owners. When buying online, look for accurate measurements of length, shoulder width, and chest width (pit to pit).Īt once ubiquitous and unique, t-shirts are great gateway to the world of vintage clothing. When thrifting, take time to search a size above what you normally wear. 100% cotton t-shirts will shrink more than polyester blends. If you find a vintage t-shirt in deadstock condition, prepare for it to shrink considerably. It’s more important to understand shrinkage. There’s plenty of anthropological explanations for this, but I’m not qualified to investigate them. That is to say, a large from 1995 will be bigger than a large from 1975. Generally speaking, the size of a shirt relative to its tagged size has increased over time. So, if we find a shirt with a given tag but no visible date, we can roughly determine its age.Īll of these shirts are tagged “Extra Large.” As you can see, they vary widely in width.Īll these shirts are tagged “Large.” They vary a great deal in length and width. When we find multiple t-shirts with the same tag but different printed dates, we can reasonably estimate a range of production for all shirts with that tag. The only certain way to date a vintage t-shirt is to have a date attached to the graphic. Below is a catalog of comma tags I’ve come across, as well as approximate dates of production. There are, to be certain, dozens of vintage t-shirt brands. You can read more about loopwheeled fabrics at Heddel’s, though understand that circular knitting is still done on an industrial scale in 2018. It’s a bit of a frog and toad scenario: Loop wheeled fabrics are made on a particular kind of vintage circular knitting machine. Please note that circular knit does not mean loop-wheeled. On many new and vintage t-shirts, two panels of fabric are joined with side seams. On a vintage tubular knit t-shirt, the fabric forms a complete cylinder around the torso. And vintage iron-on graphics can be bought unused and newly applied to any t-shirt you please. On the flip side, they often feature photographs and detail difficult to otherwise put on a t-shirt. They are subject to peeling and cracking, and don’t hold up well to numerous washes. IRON-ON HEAT TRANSFER: An iron-on graphic is exactly what it sounds like: An image or text transferred to the fabric using heat. It’s a different calculus than with Jordans or Levi’s, of course: Many deadstock t-shirts are being sold for daily wear and can be had for less than $20. I endorse use of the term so long as condition is reasonably deduced. Use of the term “deadstock” seems to me a bit more lenient in vintage t-shirt sales than in jeans or sneakers. I cannot, however, prove this conclusively. Though they lack tags or packaging, I feel confident claiming they’re deadstock. These blank t-shirts were all found together in a single lot.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |