It may be hard to believe, but at one point you could just find classic punk, metal, and rock tees on sale for the price that you might expect to pay for a previously owned shirt. All it took was some digging and a budget of ten bucks or so.
That's how I acquired some of the all-time best pieces of my collection, like an '80s-vintage bootleg Joy Division shirt from a college town vintage store, a Stevie Nicks "Rock a Little Tour '86" concert tee picked up at a stoop sale in Chicago, and my all-time greatest score, an unblemished deadstock Circle Jerks T-shirt that I unexpectedly discovered in a rural Michigan architectural salvage shop for something like four bucks, and which I wore for nearly a decade to the point where it barely qualified as clothing anymore.
Looking back at my beloved T-shirt collection now–my Dio Holy Diver tee, my '80s Bruce Springsteen tour shirt with a portrait of The Boss with an eye that went lopsided as it aged, my killer Willie Nelson baseball tee–I realize that if I'd held onto them and not worn them to shreds I could probably fund a really nice vacation by selling them off.
As the blog for the Chicago punk festival Riot Fest points out, an online resale shop called The Captain's Vintage is currently offering a selection of very previously worn punk tees at prices well into the mid-three digits, including a Circle Jerks shirt not so different from mine going for $399 and a BOY London Sid Vicious tee (which is admittedly an incredibly sick find) priced at two grand.
It's not the obsessive collector types that populate the punk world who've driven up the prices (although I've seen eBay battles over '90s hardcore tees turn truly savage), so much as celebrity stylists. A few years ago they decided to start dressing pop stars in customized punk jackets (often made by actual crabby old punks), and since then memorabilia market's rocketed to the price points that no self-respecting punk could afford.
The trend's spread outward from there: "Like Metallica tees," designer D Bruze explained in a recent story about the line of vintage-inspired shirts he designed for Future's "Purple Reign" pop-up shop. "Kids don't know the songs, they don't know the band, they just like the designs. Like, 80 percent of the youth have rock shirts in their closet—Iron Maiden, Metallica, Megadeth, whatever."
The trend doesn't seem to be slowing down at all, either. The '90s revival has already swept the vintage tee world, so old Nirvana and Sonic Youth tees are now selling for the same prices that The Captain's Vintage is charging for ones a decade older. Things have gotten so out of control that even Van Hagar shirts are going for $25, which is at least $24 more than anyone should ever pay.
It things keep up in this direction, it might not be a bad idea to go clean your local Goodwill out of its stock of early-aughts Slipknot shirts and sit on them until they turn into gold.
