Two Things

Thrift store scores and vintage t-shirts

I am not doing a lot of buying at the moment, but I did pull the trigger on a pair of Y2K-era Nike wind pants, finally. I’d watched them until the listing ended and they got relisted at a slightly lower price. Music to my ears!

I stopped at another Goodwill earlier this week to wander around. It was much calmer than the one I visited previously, though I have since read a (possibly apocryphal?) tale of someone finding a very nice Bottega Veneta bag at that location for $13. There is good reason to believe most such tales are fabricated but, you know, “any given Sunday” and all that.

Anyway I did not find a Bottega bag or much of anything at all. I passed up a nice-looking Banana Republic colorblock sweater in my favorite colors (black, white, and grey – I am who I am) for having too-high an acrylic content. I picked up a cute navy blue scarf with white lions rampant – it definitely wasn’t silk but it felt nice and I liked the pattern – and then put it back when further inspection revealed extensive staining. For $2 I could have risked it, I suppose, but it can be someone else’s project.

I walked out with a cute $2 Homer Laughlin serving dish and a pair of $8 AG jeans that I will (hopefully) sell on Poshmark. Cheap thrills.

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Lately I’ve been doing a deep dive on vintage high school t-shirts and vintage bar t-shirts. The ideal vintage tee for me is a single-stitch 50/50 blend of cotton and polyester, the better to develop a good “silky” feel. Any logo or design should be a little weird and also, mostly worn off.

I have a few such prized examples from my own life: the Oklahoma! cast sweatshirt from my high school’s production of same (this is 37 years old), a t-shirt from Grossman’s Tavern in Toronto that incidentally commemorates the first time I got properly drunk, the Abercrombie logo tee I bought right after college. I would never part with any of these, but plenty of people are willing to, and they are getting rid of them on eBay.

Here’s a good high school example, which I bought.

This next one is really good due to the homemade nature of the design and the flag corps specificity, however the seller wants $100 and that is about $80 too much IMO. Make an offer and you too can be a member of the Fern Creek Flag Corps.

I did of course search for my own high school only to find a single example, which was from a gym uniform. No thanks! (However if you went to Sill Middle School you should definitely buy this patch and sew it on a tote bag or something. Also, here is a 1970 yearbook containing Jim Jarmusch, or at least his graven image.)

The bar t-shirts are altogether much weirder and there is a lot in the vein of Spotty Mary’s Syphilis Shack or whatever (you know what I mean) but I do really love this one, hailing from Wisconsin:

And finally, while I suspect I am not the target audience for this shirt from San Francisco’s Jackhammer bar, you cannot deny the design is very good: