Your Vintage Tee Shirts May Only Seem To Be Vintage
If you’re an admirer of authentic vintage t shirts, you’ve no doubt become familiar with the way the formidable forces of publicity and salesmanship will very often pervert and confuse our way of speaking. While it may not make much difference when attempting to decide between a potato chip with an “enticing new flavor” and another with an “extreme new taste,” a smallish aberration in vocabulary might produce an ample difference when making additions to your authentic vintage t shirt collection. However, gaining insight into the proper definitions of two commonplace words might teach you to avoid making an awfully sizable but really common slip up.
The term “vintage,” for instance, is really reserved for a product that was definitely created at a specific time in days gone by, such as a brandy of a specific vintage. Or a vintage Flash Comics #1 comic book. Or even those vintage movie t shirts that have been sitting in your dresser drawer for the past couple of decades.
“Retro,” however, indicates an item that is completed in the present but brings to mind a previous fashion. Retro is fundamentally a duplicate or impression of something vintage, but is not in fact vintage itself. Newly put together ripped jeans are retro. Side ponytails are retro. Neon-colored scrunchy socks are retro. Unbecoming, true, but retro.
To state it more simply, if you enter a secondhand store and invest in some eighties tee shirts that have been used, those are vintage. If you poke through Spencer’s Gifts and acquire a new black t-shirt with a Garbage Pail Kid on it, that’s retro.
Simple as ABC, right? So why this much confusion? Well, a piece of the confoundment is that, to a world of teens, “vintage” and “retro” are nothing but two interchangeable kinds of “old.” Is that vintage Star Wars t-shirt rad because the shirt is aged, or because the film is old? Are those vintage music shirts rad because they are from the original concert, or because the bands are retro popular? A teenager probably doesn’t bother about it and makes no discrimination between the two.
Another chunk of the problem is marketing. Retro tees are hugely fashionable at this moment. The trademarks and concepts of legendary things of way back when have become totally acclaimed again. In fact, they’ve become so popular that legions of tee shirt designers have halted the practice of only employing a Snoopy, Guinness, or Jimi Hendrix logo, and gone so far as to design the t-shirts in a way that causes them to look like they’re already used, totally beloved, and considerably distressed. The result is retro shirts that look like genuine vintage t shirts but really aren’t.
So, what exactly is an everyday fan of vintage shirts expected to do? Well, you could make certain to know the disparity between the words “vintage” and “retro.” You should make sure to inspect product definitions thoughtfully, alert for turns of phrase such as “licensed shirts” (which would imply that the legal rights to use the design, figures, and/or concepts were bought but the tshirt itself was probably reproduced in recent times). And, just to double-check, you should always approach the tee shirt establishment and ask them honestly about whether their shirts are merely retro or rightly vintage.
Of course, if you aren’t a connoisseur or a devotee, I’m sure that none of this matters to you. Who, other than a collector, truly aches to score a 22-year old t shirt? I mean, unlike a vintage piece of furniture, most goods aren’t explicitly constructed to be used 20 years later. Specifically apparel. And, extra particularly, cheap t-shirts. Possibly a retro tee shirt actually is the best of both worlds.
Or could be I’m simply feeling overly sentimental. Some section of me desires that the expression “vintage” would be solely and rightly applied to my forays out to invest in tried and true 45 rpm records and 80s t shirts, rather than used to ply the “whatever’s antique-looking is cool” kink. I have an idea I’m just old.
Wait – does that mean I’m cool?
Well, no matter what sort of t shirt you get a kick out of, you can come across awesome vintage t shirts, retro tshirts, and vintage-looking retro tee shirts at Channel Shirt, where all the most excellent classic and funny t shirts on the interwebs live. Join us!
Dave Sylvester designs and collects funny t shirts for a living. If vintage tshirts are cool and valuable, then Dave’s closet full of actual ’80s vintage concert t shirts makes him the coolest, richest man in the universe. Handsome too. Get to know him at ChannelShirt.com.
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