Vintage T shirts

vintage T shirts are the best way to get style inspiration, especially on a budget. You can easily get tees from the 70s, 80s and 90s, and the originals are always a little bit better, a little bit more quirky and a little bit more worn in than any copy you can find.

Pop and Rock Vintage T shirts

Finding vintage t shirts from your favourite band is a rare joy. If you’re lucky you can find tour t shirts, listing the date and all the venues the band toured to. Sometimes there’s several different designs for each tour and it’s a challenge to collect them all! There is also the more usual merchandise from the band, such as band logos, as well as reprints of the record covers, drawings by the band members printed on tees (John Lennon of the Beatles, for example, often made doodles and his designs translate quite well to t shirts).

Another way that you can get inspiration from rock and pop stars is by being inspired by their look. If you want to look like a flamboyant Marc Bolan, I’d recommend finding skinny long sleeved mens vintage t shirts, possibly stripy and in purple. For something more 80s, look at Run DMC, who wore big baggy black tees, pork pie hats and huge gold chains. For the 90s look, Kurt Cobain wore a t shirt under a shirt under a cardigan.

Designer

Of course Katherine Hamnett invented the slogan tee in the 80s, but plenty of other top designers have featured t shirts in their collections since. If you’re looking for a particular label, designer vintage t shirts are worth searching for. That includes not just catwalk designers but sportswear designers and brands too.

Vintage Adidas and Puma t shirts are really collectible for aficionados. Recent catwalk collections taking inspiration from sportswear include Alexander Wang, with his monochrome t shirts made from technical fabric, and Hussein Chalayan, with his futuristic take on tees. Ralph Lauren used t shirts under jackets and with white trousers and sockless espadrilles to kind of casual- up the essentially tidy and preppy Ralph Lauren look this ss15.

Sportswear is a trend that never really goes away and t shirts are such a basic item of clothing that they can provide anything from a minimal under layer to a real statement. Designers play with them all the time, altering proportion and volume, shape and fabric. Prints and colours fall in and out of fashion.

Vintage T Shirts for women

VIntage t shirts can also earn you top style points if you’re female. You don’t have to actually nick your boyfriend’s to wear a boyfriend style tee. Just hunt through the men’s section at the vintage store. Feel free to customise your find, cutting off sleeves and necklines and whipping out your sewing machine to make the whole thing narrower for a true rock chick look. You can also try over-dying or distressing your precious find further to make it look even more vintage and unique.

Shop vintage T-shirts

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• Shirts