Wardrobe Planning for Friday: Wear Your Old Band T-Shirt to Work Day

BBC Radio 6 is declaring Friday, November 22 the 6th annual Wear Your Old Band T-Shirt to Work Day. There's no word on whether this will catch on in the United States and, quite frankly, it could really describe any day Berklee.

If you want to learn more about rock t-shirt culture, page through Rock Tease: The Golden Years of Rock T-shirts by Erica Easley & Ed Chalfa (NK4890.S45 E27 2006). As you might expect, it has lots of pictures of rock t-shirts. But it also goes into the nuances such as the specific aesthetics of bootleg t-shirts, how designs have evolved over the years, and profiles of people whose work has been involved with band t-shirts, most notably Arturo Vega, the Ramones' art director and designer of their iconic logo. Vega observed, "Today, the Ramones have sold more T-shirts than records, without a doubt."

As Mark Arm of Mudhoney noted regarding the clothing's signficance, "...especially in the late '70s, if you saw anybody wearing a punk rock or new wave shirt it was definitely a signifier... Battle lines were being drawn."