At ThriftCon, a vintage clothing convention held earlier this month in New York City, nostalgia was front of mind for many attendees. So were graphic T-shirts.
A self-described “elder millennial” came in search of one for the hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest, but left with an old tee for MTV’s animated series “Celebrity Deathmatch,” which aired in the late 1990s and 2000s. Another ThirftCon attendee was looking to replace a lost tee for the band the Smashing Pumpkins. Some styles for sale at the convention cost more than $800.
“You’ve heard of comfort food? These are comfort tees,” Gabriel Julio, a brand consultant from New Jersey, said jokingly. He was with a friend, Luis Avelino, owner of Illusion Vintage in Houston, who was selling graphic tees ranging from $30 to upwards of $1,000.
“Nostalgia is big business,” Avelino said. In 2021, a Grateful Dead shirt from 1967 sold for more than $17,640 at Sotheby’s, a record price. “Art, music and pop culture are always the most sought after,” Avelino added.
Like other vintage items, graphic tees have become more valuable for their ability to convey personality and authenticity. That was partially why Janet Jackson chose to wear one to the BET Awards in June, according to her stylist, Laurel Thomson.
“Originally, we had an outfit picked out—a look straight off the runway,” Thomson said. “Then Janet said she wanted to do something completely different.” The ensemble Jackson wore to the awards—a Tupac Shakur tee with a striped shirt and striped trousers—was a nod to the two artists’ 1993 film, “Poetic Justice,” Thomson said, as well as an act of “self-expression and individuality.”
Enrique Crame III, 48, whose Fine and Dandy vintage showrooms in Manhattan have provided clothes to shows like “The Bear” and “And Just Like That…,” said that old graphic tees can instantly tell a story.
Miley Cyrus commemorated the 20th anniversary of “Hannah Montana” this past spring in an old “Hannah Montana” T-shirt worn beneath a Rabanne gown. Zendaya wore an oversize Spider-Man tee as a dress to an event promoting her film “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” in June.
“You want a movie or TV character to have a back story, and a vintage tee does that without having to say a word,” Crame said. Prized tees in his possession include one that Keith Haring made to promote Madonna’s 1990 “Blond Ambition” tour.
Ryan Beck, COO of the luxury resale business Justin Reed, noted that band or rap tees specifically can be conversation starters. “The rarer, the better,” Beck said. “If it’s a one-off or something not licensed, there’s a market.” Justin Reed recently sold a bootleg Lauryn Hill tee—unofficial merchandise—for $4,500, Beck added.
The lived-in quality of vintage graphic tees can only add to their value. “Early on, people and stores wouldn’t buy anything distressed or with holes,” said Patrick Matamoros, 51, who grew up in East Los Angeles and started picking up decrepit, threadbare T-shirts at area flea markets more than 30 years ago. “Now people can’t get enough,” he added, “because they have history to them; they took years to get like that.”
Matamoros, who began selling tees to vintage shops in the ’90s and early ’00s, said that a telling sign of their evolution into luxury goods was when a line of customized vintage T-shirts that he made with the streetwear designer Jerry Lorenzo sold out soon after being released in 2016. In addition to band tees, Matamoros also traffics in vintage styles for movies like “Star Wars” and in T-shirts bearing brand names like Coca-Cola, Puma and Nike.
His biggest sale to date was a long-sleeve Nirvana tee from the British leg of the band’s final U.K. tour. Only nine of the shirts are said to exist in the world. Matamoros sold the T-shirt to Kosuke Iwatani, a vintage dealer in Japan, for $55,000.
“I remember guys asking, ‘What you gonna do when vintage isn’t cool anymore?’ ” Matamoros said, recalling his earlier days of selling graphic tees. “I’d always laugh.”
Corrections & Amplifications: The long-sleeve Nirvana tee is from the British leg of the band’s final U.K. tour. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said it was from British leg of the band’s final tour. (Corrected on Aug. 20)
