How Lying to Yourself Explains $500 T-Shirt Purchases
This week on One Size Fits All, I'm going to explore the reasoning and psychology of buyers who are shelling out hundreds of dollars on music, video game, and movie tees.
Hi friends!
This past week, I prompted listeners of the podcast and some close friends about their experiences with nostalgia-driven purchases, and hundreds of you wrote in (thank you, by the way!) with your unique experiences. This week on One Size Fits All, we’re going to explore memory, our passions, and how and why vintage t-shirts became so expensive.
This is a free publication, and I don’t accept any bribes in the form of free clothing to mention anything in this piece. If you’d like to support One Size Fits All, share the piece, engage in the chat, and follow me on Instagram to help in future research!
I don’t love the meteoric upward price trend of vintage t-shirts, but I do like the interesting dichotomy between people’s desires to connect with past versions of themselves and sellers capitalizing on the market. Friends and writers-in explained their most expensive vintage t-shirt purchases, with the majority of responses falling in the $60-120 range but with high-end outliers exceeding $1,000. For my personal grail, a Japan-exclusive Discovery promotional shirt, the asking price is $1,000: I dry heave while thinking about spending that much on a cotton tee. How did the vintage t-shirt market get to this point?
Let’s dig into the willingness to pay. My mom was the one who introduced me in 2013 when she got me four vinyl records from Urban Outfitters for my birthday: one of those records was Random Access Memories. I’ve been a fan of Daft Punk ever since. That being said, I have not and cannot claim to be part of the crowd who saw their iconic performance at Coachella in 2006 (fun fact! They were offered $300,000 to perform!) nor did I attend their Alive Tour in 2007. Those performances carry a mystique for me; I wish I could have been there, but I was too busy reading Alex Rider books and doing after-school sports.
I’m not unique here. Many of the people who wrote in to me to share their experiences expressed similar throughlines: being too young for the inception or peak of a movement/band/movie/etc, but maintaining a passion for said thing and yearning to connect with it on a deeper level than simply enjoying the product.
Long-time pod listener and oomfie, Jaakko puts it well:
“My first music-related memories that I can remember are those of Iron Maiden. My father introduced me to their music when I was 4, and the band’s music has been with me through my entire life and although they still perform, the band is not the same as they were in 1985-1990. I cannot go back to those times but I can buy and search for the memorabilia that is from the "golden age". [The merch] holds a personal significance: to have something from the band's past, [especially a] time when I was not alive. Also, this might be coping, but old shirts from the 80's and 90's seem to have been made with better quality. Having a "better" quality shirt with some history to it or a rarity kind of makes me want it more than a new shirt with the same design.”
To Jaakko’s point, while designs can be reproduced or reprinted (this, allegedly, happens at Lara Koleji in the Lower East Side), it’s a lot less cool to own a bootleg in most cases. While one’s experience with something may not be ‘authentic’, in that they weren’t able to attend or witness the glory days of that thing, the item-as-artifact being authentic forges for a better, more ‘real’ connection. There now exists a commodified proxy or a substitute to an authentic experience in the form of a vintage t-shirt. This may be a New York/LA/London-exclusive connotation, but when I see someone wearing a tour tee, I no longer immediately assume that the person attended the show or event themselves.
A shirt acting as or signaling a ‘real’ connection is interesting; there’s a level of acknowledging someone’s commitment to something if they’re willing to wear it on themselves. Research done by MIT found explored social signaling, which is the fundamental method we use for forming impressions. It found that the reliability of a signal rests squarely on costs within the domain of the quality being signaled: high-cost signals are more difficult to replicate easily, they are therefore more reliable. Thus, even if the experience associated with a t-shirt (or participation in the activity itself) isn’t genuine, the signal it provides provides credence to the opposite: the more expensive the item, the more genuine the connection is assumed or understood to be.
We’re just as capable of lying to ourselves as we are to others. Repeat something, even something false, enough times and you’ll start to believe it. Further, fake or alternate memories are really easy to create (this paper is really cool, even a little scary). There’s also the tendency to exaggerate one’s role or aspects of oneself when recalling information that isn’t easily accessible. By wearing a vintage t-shirt, you are not only signaling your connection to said thing to others, but you are simultaneously exaggerating the thing’s role in your own life and reinforcing the connection to said thing in your own mind. Remember how the Venom suit in Spider Man 3 (with Tobey Maguire) started corrupting him even when he wasn’t fully suited up? It’s like that.
As I said before, I think this dynamic, in a weird way, is sort of wonderful. We use fashion to form bonds with others, intentionally or unintentionally, inadvertently lying to ourselves as a means to connect in a deeper way with our passions. Yes, this can be done in an artificial way, but I want to give my friends and people I see some grace before tagging them with the dreaded p-word (poser, don’t be weird). We all want to be cool, interesting people, and use clothing to bond to our childhood passions and the inherent associations with being (mostly!) happy and carefree. Harrey put it well when explaining to me his love for Neopets and vintage Neopets shirts:
“Everything about [Neopets] makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. Wearing the shirt reminds me of nothing but happiness and life before I had responsibilities! It’s less about the art and more about the thought behind it.”
The power of nostalgia and memory work in tandem to make the memories we keep more intense. This is partially because of the passage of time (duh!), partially because those experiences are less accessible to one’s working memory, partially because we warp those experiences as we recount them, but also because our perception of time makes them more important. Younger people experience time differently than older people do. Basically, when you’re young, you perceive each passing hour, month, and year as comparatively longer than each subsequent hour in a phenomenon called the “proportional theory of time”.
This means that every moment you spent, or currently spend, doing something now will be experienced for longer than if you were to do that same thing for the same amount of time in a year. It makes sense as to why our childhoods, and what we did during them, hold so much significance: back then, the time we invested in those experiences felt richer and stretched longer compared to how we perceive similar activities now. Spooky, right?
I’m 25. Novel experiences are not as common as they were in my younger years. Time slides by increasingly quickly. Honestly, it’s quite scary. It makes sense, for me and many others, that we look back on our past experiences and passions with fondness and want to reconnect. All-around cool guy (also, I’ve yet to find something that he’s not good at) Lance shared his love for “everything”:
“T-shirts, toys, books, and posters [are my favorites], but my two most notable [purchases] are my Sex Pistols Thrashed Tee and my Peko t-shirt/memorabilia. Sid Vicious and I share the same birthday and albeit he isn't the best person, I’ve never related to or shared a birthday with anyone except him. I had to do a report back in high school on a figure that you share a birthday with and got enamored with how cool, stylish, and unapologetically himself he was which drew me to collect stuff with him or his likeness on it. Peko is a mascot for Milky, a Japanese candy company. I collect all the stuff from Peko, no matter what it is, just because my mom bought me Peko candy every time we went to grab groceries. My mom and I aren't close at all anymore but I always feel closer knowing that this detail that's so easily looked upon is something I hold so sacred and Peko for me now reminds me of her when I was young. Nostalgia is a huge thing for me, it’s the one bridge that connects you to all versions of yourself no matter what current time or being you’re in.”
As Lance says, nostalgia is a bridge that connects you to all versions of yourself. In a time where people are increasingly anxious, struggling with depression, feeling alienated, connecting with a more ‘pure’ version of yourself and your experiences (again, facilitated by your inadvertent warping of your own memories) feels like an escape. In what is not a revelation, social media extenuates these negative feelings: There’s never been such a desire or pressure to belong to an in-crowd, prove that you’re having or have had more authentic experiences, can cite increasingly niche pieces of information, and own a rarer, more expensive thing than the next person.
Fashion influencers and vintage t-shirt sellers utilize nostalgia to form communities and engage their audiences, harnessing the ability of memory as an escape to build their platforms. Wisdom Kaye built a platform from of “recreating outfits of anime/TV/comic book” videos, ascending from working at the perfect intersection of anime’s resurgence and widespread social acceptance and people’s nostalgia for cartoons and animation of the 2000’s. He’s managed to climb to the absolute peak of the fashion industry, lifted by his community of nerds (a term I use with the utmost affection) and winning the respect of both crowds by dressing incredibly well in clothes that could be sold to buy an apartment in most major cities.
Influencers aren’t the only ones utilizing the feelings of nostalgia to propel their careers and businesses. Vintage t-shirt sellers similarly find themselves in niche markets composed of motivated participants with a high willingness to pay for their passions. These vendors ostensibly sell cultural capital and access to an in-crowd. As discussed before, owning an expensive and/or rare vintage shirt shows an ‘authentic’ connection and thus a deep appreciation for the franchise/music/movie/etc. Further, sellers, in owning the shirts to sell, accumulate cultural capital and signal to buyers that, by simply having the item to sell, they must know and appreciate the thing in question just as much as they do, warping the dynamic between buyer and seller.
This all sounds slightly malicious; let me provide an example to reassure people that the sky isn’t falling and that they’re not going to priced out of everything they find interesting. Enrique Crame III, owner of Fine and Dandy Throwback (a vintage shirt and clothing store in Hell’s Kitchen), is an avid collector of vintage clothing, prone to trading, swapping, and generally working to get passionate people in cool clothes that reflect those passions. I’d say this is the perfect example of someone facilitating the culture for good despite there being an element of commodifying nostalgia: he often mentions that Matt (his wonderful husband and business partner) reminds him that while it’s fun to buy and trade, rent can’t be paid in shirts.
Enrique is, unfortunately, not the blueprint for every vintage store owner. I’ve met a lot of owners who are super nice people, but their prices make me dry heave. Some might call what they do gouging. There is, inevitably, a group of people that will exploit buyers’ want to engage with what they love and push to see just how much people are willing to pay.
In this vein, another salient reason for price inflation is the near-permanent record of sales online; once someone sees a successful, high-priced sale of their item, their new floor price rises to that level. It’s an unfortunate cycle, especially because the best deals used to be found on slightly thrashed, paint-splattered shirts, which are now sometimes more expensive than the original deadstock versions.
Does the growth of physical vintage stores signal the death of in-person or virtual vintage hunting for the little guy? I don’t think so. Is it getting harder? Absolutely. I’m still picking up really interesting shirts from my beloved Daft Punk that may ultimately be more rare than that Discovery promotional tee.
You used to be able to find just about anything given enough time, patience, and knowledge of niche sellers or websites. However, with vintage-selling-as-a-profession exploding in popularity, paired with rising awareness of the fact that vintage shirts in particular can fetch some pretty crazy prices, those spaces are being infiltrated and crowded by sellers who can afford to pay a buy-it-now price rather than sending offers or who can continue to bid well past the limits of someone who can’t immediately flip the item in a storefront. The goodwill bins, relatively empty during my freshman and sophomore years of college, exploded in popularity after the pandemic.
Are these pieces worth the money and time we put into finding and/or buying them? I don’t really care; I love them for what they represent to me, and that’s more than enough.
I loved the article! I love how added psychological research that backs up your article.
One issue I think the vintage movement that you touched on was it being used as a ticket to an in-crowd. It is something I have seen at Little 5 Points, one of Atlanta’s main alternative cultural centers slowly become more and more poisoned with vintage curation shops. It feels like they use the idea of nostalgia and clothing from an era where counter culture existed as an excuse to charge absurd prices for orange tab levi’s or 90’s single stitched tee’s. The whole section feels like an homage to a period that has passed instead of creating a new movement.