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When Authentic Vintage T Shirts Might Not Be So Vintage

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If you're a nut for vintage tee shirts, you've likely realized the way the extreme energy of business and hoopla will ravage and degenerate our use of words. While this might not make a difference when choosing between a snack cracker that has a "rich new flavor" and another that features a "hot new taste," a meager differentiation in speech may prove to be an extremely large difference when purchasing for your vintage tee shirt collection. Lucky for you, studying the tiny difference between two everyday words could teach you not to make a really big but surprisingly common blunder.

The term "vintage," for instance, is defined as anything that was truly completed at a definite time in the past, such as a champagne of a certain vintage. Or a vintage Wolverine comic book. Or even those vintage sports t shirts that have been sitting in your dresser drawer since you were in high school.

"Retro," by contrast, is really reserved for an item that is manufactured today but brings to mind an older thing. Retro is essentially a recreation or knock-off of something vintage, but is not really vintage itself. Recently produced things that are pastel and say "Stoked" on them are retro. Sideburns are retro. Neon-colored t shirts are retro. Unbecoming, but retro.

To put it more clearly, if you look through a secondhand shop and obtain some 1980s t-shirts that are actually from back before Jessica Simpson was even jailbait yet, those are vintage. If you poke around Spencer's Gifts and pay for a new black t shirt with the original A-Team cast on it, that's retro.

Simple, right? So how can there seemingly be no end to the confusion? Well, a percentage of the confusion is due to the fact that, to not a few young folk, "vintage" and "retro" are nothing but dual kinds of "old." Is that vintage Ghostbusters tee shirt cool because the shirt is old, or because the flick is old? Are those vintage rock tee shirts cool because they were purchased at the original concert, or because the bands are retro voguish? A teenager very likely doesn't agonize about it and creates no contrast between the two.

Another chunk of the bafflement is sales. Retro t shirts are very chic at this time. The slogans and ideas of cherished fixtures of times past have become totally chic all over again. In fact, they've become so trendy that tons of tee designers have stopped drawing the line at purely utilizing a Voltron, Jolt Cola, or Pink Floyd logo, and instead begun to design the t-shirts in a way that causes them to look long used, extensively revered, and undeniably distressed. The effect is retro tee shirts that look like bona fide vintage t shirts but really aren't.

So, what exactly is a poor connoisseur of vintage t-shirts to do? Well, you could make certain you recognize the distinction between the words "vintage" and "retro." You could most certainly make sure you parse product blurbs warily, keeping an eye out for things like "licensed tees" (which would reveal that the rights to make a t-shirt with the configuration, characters, and/or intentions were purchased but the t shirt itself was absolutely reprinted not so long ago). And, if you really want to make sure, you could always communicate with the tshirt market and question them frankly about whether their t-shirts are simply retro or undeniably vintage.

At any rate, if you aren't a collector or a fanatic, this probably matters to you not even a little. Who, other than a collector, really has an urge to purchase a 28-year old t shirt? I mean, unlike a vintage guitar amp, some items aren't seriously projected to be going strong 20 years later. Particularly clothing. And, even more especially, budget shirts. Maybe a retro shirt categorically is the best of both worlds.

Or it's possible I'm only being overly sentimental. Some corner of me desires that the description "vintage" would be wholly and truthfully applied to my journeys to purchase old sci-fi novels and eighties tshirts, rather than used to goose the "whatever's aged-looking is cool" notion. I suppose I'm just old.

Wait a sec - does that mean I'm cool?

Article Source: http://depositarticles.com/

Well, no matter what kind of t shirt you prefer, you'll come up with awesome vintage tshirts, retro tshirts, and vintage-looking retro tees at Channel Shirt, where all the primo classic and funny t shirts on the interwebs reside. Join us! Dave Sylvester creates and collects funny tshirts for a living. If vintage t shirts are cool and valuable, then Dave's closet full of official eighties vintage rock t-shirts makes him the coolest, richest man on Earth. Good-looking too. Get to know him at ChannelShirt.com.

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