Vintage Tees
Walt Disney Has Been Dead Since 1966 and His Quotes Are on More Shirts Than Ever
Walt Disney died on December 15, 1966. In the decades since, his words — or words attributed to him — have appeared on more t-shirts, coffee mugs, wall decals, and...
The Smiths Lasted Five Years and Left Enough T-Shirts for Fifty
The Smiths existed from 1982 to 1987. Five years. Four studio albums. A greatest hits collection that became one of the best-selling albums in UK history. And then they were...
A Cure T-Shirt Used to Be a Signal. Now It's Just a Shirt. Both Are Fine.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA There was a period — roughly 1985 to 1995 — when wearing a Cure t-shirt was not a neutral act. It was a...
The Cramps Never Made Sense and That Was the Entire Point
The Cramps existed from 1976 to 2009. In those 33 years they invented a genre (psychobilly), refused to use a bass player for most of their career, got banned from...
Mike Kelley's Thrift-Store Animals and the Sonic Youth Shirt That Came From Them
Photo via Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.5 The cover art for Sonic Youth's 1992 album Dirty was made by Mike Kelley, a visual artist from Detroit who spent most...
Se7en Was David Fincher's Revenge on Hollywood and It Made $327 Million
David Fincher's experience making Alien 3 was, by all accounts including his own, a nightmare. The studio interfered constantly. The final cut wasn't his. He disowned the film. When Se7en...
Salvador Dali Designed His Own Face and Then the Bootleggers Printed It on Everything
Photo by Philippe Halsman, 1948 / Library of Congress / Public Domain Salvador Dali's mustache was not an accident. He waxed it upward into two points every day of his...
Sade Made Four Albums in Twenty Years and Every Single One Was Perfect
Sade Adu released her first album with the band Sade in 1984. Diamond Life sold over ten million copies. She released her fourth album, Lovers Rock, in 2000. Between those...
John Pasche Got Paid £50 for the Rolling Stones Tongue. Then What Happened.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0 In 1970, a 25-year-old graphic design student at the Royal College of Art named John Pasche was introduced to Mick Jagger through...
The Word 'Rice' in Car Culture: Complicated, Contested, and All Over the T-Shirts
In import car culture, "rice" is a loaded word. It started as a slur — "rice burner," "rice rocket" — used by American muscle car enthusiasts to dismiss Japanese imports...
The Problem With Putting Rage Against the Machine on a T-Shirt
Photo by Scott Penner / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0 There's a contradiction at the heart of every Rage Against the Machine t-shirt, and it's the same contradiction the...
Ozzy Osbourne Has Been a T-Shirt Longer Than He Was a Rock Star
Photo via Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0 Consider the timeline. Ozzy Osbourne fronted Black Sabbath from 1968 to 1979. His solo career peaked commercially between 1980 and roughly 1992....