The Rise and Rise of the Band Shirt
Inside vintage’s red-hot market with Rick Moe, go-to tee dealer for the likes of Jerry Lorenzo and Virgil Abloh.
The Rock Tee holds an immortal place in the zeitgeist like few other garments do. In the pre-Internet Age, it served as a signifier for like-minded fans to find one another and band together in tastes that were obscure or subcultural. With the explosion of social media, though, it’s ascended to new highs as a staple of 21st-century style, ubiquitous in paparazzi shots, Instagram feeds and the runways alike.
Way back in 2012, Nicolas Ghesquière, then-creative director of Balenciaga, riffed on Iron Maiden’s iconically heavy-metal typeface. Off-White has sent forth their take on an Oasis tee, and death metal graphics have turned up in Vetements collections. Hell, the members of Slayer have even feuded with the Kardashian-Jenners about the latter sporting their merch, sparking plenty of conversation about the nature of gatekeeping and whether to wear a band’s logo is a right that has to be earned. Rock shirts have moved out of the merch booth and into a place of marketability.
At the forefront of the past decade’s vintage tee boom is Rick Moe, founder of Tyranny + Mutation. Since opening his virtual doors in 2012, Moe has racked up a clientele including the likes of Rihanna, Jerry Lorenzo, Travis Scott, Virgil Abloh and Lena Waithe. His shop spans decades, genres and sensibilities, from your lurid ‘90s Rolling Stones tie-dye to a perfectly distressed Wu-Tang style.
Ahead of his curation for the Fall Exhibit, GOAT caught up with Moe to talk about the first tee he ever bought, the escalation of his industry and the grail tee he’s still hunting for.
Shop the full Tyranny + Mutation collection here.
What are your first memories of iconography where band tees are concerned?
When I was in second grade in the late ‘80s, this cool older kid in our neighborhood had a KISS belt buckle that sparkled. They were really the first group I got into. I remember in sixth grade really vividly you would go to school and the kids would be wearing the shirts from the concert they saw the night before. I was not hip enough to go to those and even if I was, my parents probably wouldn't have let me. I'm like, “What the hell is a Blue Öyster Cult?” Fast-forward, my business today is named after that band. But yeah, [rock iconography] always struck me as something kind of sacred in a way.
Did it become for you, like it was for me, kind of a signifier? ‘Oh, these might be my people.’ You see someone on the street, like maybe I could relate to this person?
Totally. That happened more in high school where there are cliques and if you're wearing a certain thing, you're cool to those people or whatever. Whether it was my heavy metal phase and I'm wearing the heavy metal t-shirts or the punk phase and you're wearing the punk t-shirts, certainly. I could say the same today. It's a little different because it's so mainstream now, but if someone is wearing that certain band, sometimes you can still feel like you're both in on the secret.
Totally. Do you remember the first rock tee you ever bought?
It was probably Rush. That was the first concert I went to and I remember getting one from the show. It was a jersey, one of those baseball ones. It's much harder to wear those these days. Then the second concert I saw was also Rush. I still have that one. Fortunately I got it big enough that I can actually still wear it.
Tell me a little bit about your path to doing this as a career.
Well, I was a musician. I still am, but in the ‘90s I would get home from these tours and not have a job and just hate the alternatives for getting a quick job and then to go out on tour again. Finally after the second European tour I did, I got back and I got a job at [resale chain] Buffalo Exchange in Tucson, and ended up working for them for like six years. I did everything from working the bottom-of-the-rung positions up into management. I worked at the GA offices, doing accounting, went on buy trips and then transferred to LA and did two years there. I got to LA and saw what the vintage market really was—this is the early 2000s. I would buy all day every day. [At their La Brea location] there'd be a line out the door of people selling stuff. It was a different time then. I saw that and I would price stuff more expensively. Buffalo Exchange, that's not their model, so I got in trouble. [But] it wasn't like the stuff wasn't selling, you know what I mean?
But you knew what you had.
Exactly. I moved to New York and started a job with a really high-end vintage clothing store. I moved to Seattle after five years in New York and I ended up starting my own business there and after working at a place called Blackbird, a high-end men's boutique. At the end of that in 2012, when their company [transitioned away from a retail brick-and-mortar], I had all my vintage experience plus e-commerce, and Instagram was just starting, so I put that stuff together and that's what I've been doing ever since.
In the almost 10 years that you've been doing this, how have you kind of seen the rise of social media shape the vintage space?
It's totally transformed it. I never sold on [resale sites] or anything, I’ve just sold on my own website since 2012. At that time, there were maybe three or four other vintage tee dealers, total. From then to now, it's just turned into this hype-driven thing. I don't mean to say that it's become hype in the last year or two, it's grown exponentially over that time. Who would have known that vintage, the way I saw vintage in 2012, would be what it is now? I couldn't have predicted it.
I had worked with Jerry Lorenzo for like a year and a half when he mentioned me in an interview with GQ in January 2015. There was a link to my website in the article, which basically turned my business on. It was like flipping a switch, where I had had two or three lean years coming up to that, and after it I was getting multiple orders a day. As long as you're feeding it, it's just going to sell itself. So, some of those celebrities like Jerry and Justin Bieber certainly had a big impact on vintage and what it is now.
You can't really get away from that. If they're wearing this stuff and they're seen as the epitome of, not just cool, but street hipness, it's going to be something that explodes. I think the last thing that really transformed with the game was these Instagram Live auctions of vintage during COVID. It picked up enough steam where last summer a Disney Aladdin t-shirt sold for over $6,000 on one of these live auctions.
A Disney shirt? Wow...
It’s something I wouldn't think I could ever make any money off of, let alone buy and try and sell. [The vintage tee market] was hype enough before COVID, but during COVID these live auctions blew up. It's like a high... you get caught up in the heat of the bidding, like a real auction. And so things get driven up in price, depending on who's selling it, depending on their spin on it.
That $6,000 sale got written up in the Wall Street Journal, and that transformed it, then you expose that sort of a cash incentive to anyone. Anyone at that point is saying, “Oh, well, maybe I can find a Disney shirt at a Goodwill and sell it for $6,000.” It doesn't work that way but that's what it's really become. Each year, the amount of people selling vintage doubles and triples.
As you've watched this market escalate over the past decade, was there ever a moment where the hype repelled you? Was it hard to come to terms with that, coming from a punk and metal background, and as a musician?
There were a couple of times where I thought about doing something else, but it wasn't really related to the hype necessarily. I remember when I first started seeing other people on Instagram mimic what I do, back when I was getting big shout outs from Jerry. In 2016 he co-credited me as curating Justin Bieber's wardrobe for the Purpose tour and he didn't have to. I mean, he bought a lot of stuff from me and customized it for Justin, but he straight up co-credited me and that drove my business to even a higher level.
I still feel, even though there's a million new people doing it since I started, there's room for someone to do it their own way. If you're doing it a certain way, it's just like a boutique, really. You open your own little boutique and, if you curate your stuff to a specific clientele and you do it with passion and those people see that and they appreciate it, they're just going to keep coming and they'll spread the word and you'll be okay. So I've had my ups and downs, but I've never given in because of the hype, not yet.
This groundswell of celebrities in vintage rock tees feels like it's reached fever pitch in the past five years or so. In terms of specific iconographies, whether we're talking about death metal graphics or the Grateful Dead, what are the ones you've seen hit the hardest with buyers?
To me, maybe I've just done it too long, but I think a lot of it has to do with just, either bands that are mainstream in terms of cultural [awareness], being a household name. Metallica or Nirvana or Rolling Stones, that stuff always sells. Always has, always will. Some of the iconography that you might see on celebrities or if you think about graphics that are appropriated by fashion designers, historically they've riffed on Metallica, or they've riffed on Nirvana graphics or other aesthetics or fonts. Fonts are a big thing.
There's an art to a t-shirt graphic, in my opinion. It's an art form. I feel like that's something that's made allover print t-shirts a little bit more popular. It's a very bold art piece that you can wear. If you're looking at it in terms of art, then it kind of opens up to anything, where an Aladdin t-shirt can be something really special. If it's a graphic on a t-shirt, it has this cache now; it kind of always did, but now there’s such a spotlight on it. It's not just about a band t-shirt anymore.
It's interesting to see the rise of ‘Merch’ as a phenomenon over—I guess also the past 10 years. Was it Life of Pablo that really started it? Then everything was about merch in the way that now, restaurants have merch. The pizza place has merch.
I give Jerry Lorenzo a lot of credit because he was taking shirts from me and making his own merch with it. 2013 was the beginning of all of that. I think it was a combination of streetwear brands and these sort of, meet these sort of capsule collections for touring artists, and Jerry had a big part to play in that. He did that with Kanye and with Justin. He wasn't the only one, but he was there at the beginning. It'll be interesting to see where that goes now that bands are touring again.
Do you still buy for yourself?
Yes. I'm—unfortunately—a fan and a collector so I'm always looking. If it doesn't fit me or if I get sick of wearing it, I can sell it. The job I've chosen for myself is also enabling my addiction to vintage. It's very hard to not justify buying too much.
What would you estimate your personal collection at in terms of volume?
Upwards of 500 personals. I have to purge, but that's probably the most it's ever been.
Is there a grail tee that you're still looking for?
There always is. An MC5 Mosquitohead shirt. That's one of the ones that I've never owned. But there are also the ones out there I haven't seen and when I see them, I have to have them. I'm amazed that I can do this for 20-plus years and there are still shirts out there that I've never seen.
And you still get that same thrill?
Still.