Vintage Tees
Nirvana Played Live for About Four Years. These Shirts Are What's Left.
Photo by P.B. Rage / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0 Nirvana's touring career lasted roughly from 1989 to early 1994. That's it. Five years if you're generous, four if...
Woody Harrelson Was a Sitcom Actor When He Got Cast as a Mass Murderer
Before Natural Born Killers, Woody Harrelson was Woody from Cheers. The lovable bartender. The simple guy with the good heart. NBC viewers knew his face as the face of a...
Natural Born Killers Was the Most Controversial Film of 1994 and Everybody Saw It Anyway
Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers came out in August 1994. It was rated R for "extreme violence and graphic carnage, for shocking images, and for strong language and sexuality." Warner...
Kurt Cobain Memorial Tees and the Year Everyone Made One
Photo via Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0 Kurt Cobain died on April 5, 1994. Within weeks, bootleg memorial shirts were being sold on sidewalks in Seattle, on Telegraph Avenue...
In the Weeks After September 11, Everyone Made a T-Shirt
Freedom Is on the Merch "If You See Something, Screen Print Something" "Freedom Isn't Free (But the T-Shirts Were $10)" "Mission Accomplished" In the weeks after September 11, 2001, the...
Albert Einstein's Face Is on More T-Shirts Than Any Scientist Who Ever Lived. Here's Why.
Albert Einstein died in 1955. His image rights are managed by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, to which he bequeathed his personal papers and intellectual property. In theory, putting Einstein's...
The Gulf War Lasted 42 Days and the T-Shirt Industry Was Ready on Day One
The Mother of All Merch The Mother of All Bootlegs I Flew 3,000 Miles to Make a Pun This Will Not Stand Smart Bombs, Dumb Shirts New World Order Support...
The 90s Military Graphic Tee: When Gun Show Merch Crossed Over
Photo by U.S. Department of Defense / Public Domain There's a specific genre of American t-shirt that exists at the intersection of military culture, graphic design, and the kind of...
Terror Has Been the Same Band for Twenty Years and That's the Point
Terror formed in Los Angeles in 2002. Scott Vogel, the vocalist, had already done time in Buried Alive and Slugfest. The rest of the lineup was drawn from the same...
Miyazaki Didn't Attend the Oscars Because of the Iraq War. Then His Film Won.
Spirited Away won Best Animated Feature at the 75th Academy Awards in March 2003. Hayao Miyazaki was not in the building. He was in Japan. He had reportedly declined to...
The 90s Thriller Promo Tee: A Film Marketing Format That Died With the Decade
In the 1990s, film studios promoted major releases by producing t-shirts. Not the kind you could buy at a store — the kind that were given away at press junkets,...
The Mazda RX-7 Used a Type of Engine That Almost Nobody Else Would Touch
The Wankel rotary engine works on a principle so elegant it's almost suspicious: a triangular rotor spinning in an epitrochoidal housing, doing the work of intake, compression, combustion, and exhaust...