While going through some of my clothes, I happened upon a t-shirt I bought almost eighteen years ago, which I nominate as the best t-shirt ever. Not because it’s comfortable or well-made, or even lawful (the designs are “bootlegged”).
The back story is that I was living and working in Manhattan (at Fried, Frank, fwiw) in the Summer of 1990. T-shirt vendors, mostly African immigrants, sold their wares on the street almost everywhere in these pre-Giuliani days. The two hot t-shirt designs were bootleg “black Bart Simpsons“, and designs honoring Nelson Mandela, who visited New York that Summer. One brilliant captialist, looking for a niche in a market already swamped with hundreds of vendors selling Simpson shirts, and hundreds more selling Mandela shirts, had an idea. Click to see it, a tribute to the entrepreneurial spirit.
