“Three days of peace and music”, was the slogan of the Woodstock Festival, which brought together half a million people hippies on a farm in Sullivan County, New York in 1969. The event, held during the Vietnam War, became a counterculture touchstone, with Jimi Hendrix closing the program with a guitar solo singing the American anthem in protest against his country’s warmongering. It is curious that the meeting hippies par excellence, that hymn to free love and the rejection of consumerism, 56 years later is a source of speculation. An original jacket from a Woodstock staff member, with a logo of a bird perched on a guitar neck on the back, sells for €13,174.95 on the WyCo Vintage website. It is currently the most expensive item in your store. online—There are more valuable ones in the physical store in Kansas City—. “It has signs of wear on the back. Otherwise it is in good condition,” it is announced. And it is precisely wear and tear that gives it value.
“People want to connect with the essence, with the story behind the garments.” vintage of concerts. They transport you to a time in history where maybe you weren’t there, but you wish you were, and that’s the only thing you can get,” explains Patrick Klima, CEO of this original concert and pop culture merchandise store from the ’60s to the ’90s, by phone from Kansas. “It’s so much more Cold You need to buy a very nice poster or painting and hang it on the wall. You can wear it. People see it as more than just a t-shirt. It’s as if, in a certain sense, it’s a work of art,” he explains of the growing revaluation of this type of object.
Even auction houses treat them as valuable works of art. In 2021, Sotheby’s auctioned off a selection of Grateful Dead memorabilia in New York, including a yellow T-shirt featuring the band’s logo that was estimated to sell for between $6,000 and $8,000. However, that simple cotton t-shirt that in the 1960s belonged to a sound engineer who worked for the group ended up costing collector Bo Bushnell 19,300 dollars – more than 16,500 euros – who made it the t-shirt. vintage the most expensive piece ever sold at auction: the record was previously held by a Led Zeppelin song sold in 2011 for $10,000 on eBay. “I didn’t care what I had to pay, I had to buy it to complete my collection,” Bushnell said in an interview in 2024.
In the four years since that auction, the price of virtually everything has increased, but the power of nostalgia and its influence on younger generations has made the revaluation of used concert T-shirts particularly surprising. “My holy grail. Nas sold for 27,000 dollars (23,000 euros),” the co-founder of the Bangkok-based shop Thunderstuck said in July in an Instagram video in which he hands a T-shirt with the American rapper’s face to his buyer, who in turn hands him the substantial wad of cash. “Things changed a lot around 2012, when everything from the nineties started to become vintage and a new market with a lot of demand has been created,” says Klima.
The market experts vintage They peg the peak of music T-shirts at about 20 years after that band or singer’s initial popularity. “There are legendary bands like The Rolling Stones or Iron Maiden that will always generate demand, but now we have a lot of customers looking for stuff from the nineties, especially bands like Nirvana or Alice in Chains,” confirms the CEO of WyCo Vintage. There are also other factors that trigger the popularity of specific artists. “The death of Ozzy Osbourne (who died last July of cardiac arrest) created a huge demand for Ozzy and Black Sabbath T-shirts,” says Klima. Other reasons are less tragic: “When Guns N’ Roses announced they were going on tour Not in this life… In 2016 we sold a lot of their stuff because a lot of people were going to see them in concert for the first time. There was a lot of excitement because no one thought they would go on tour again. Something similar happened with Oasis, their shirts came off when they announced the new tour.”
Journalist Jacob Bernstein, son of Nora Ephron and Carl Bernstein, is one of those T-shirt collectors. vintage of concerts in which WyCo Vintage participates. In 2017 he confessed in one of his articles The New York Times who was absent from the family’s Christmas dinner for 40 minutes to buy a George Michael T-shirt before prices skyrocketed due to his death – died on December 25, 2016. “When I started collecting ten years ago, I had one rule: Don’t buy T-shirts from concerts I haven’t been to. Then I found a Prince and the Revolution T-shirt from the East Village tour. purple rain for 45 dollars. What if he wasn’t there? The rules were soon broken. The shirt of purple rain It was my initiation drug,” he acknowledged.
Bernstein compared the drug to collecting T-shirts because of the addiction it creates, or perhaps the pleasure he gets from receiving it or how bad it hurts his pocket. The fact is that the exponential growth of this market and the constant opening of stores —online and the physical ones, which offer this type of item, beyond platforms like eBay and Etsy, prove that many of those who try it repeat. “We have many famous customers, be they musicians, athletes, artists, comedians… There are many people from the entertainment world with whom we have built an excellent relationship over the years because what we sell is very exclusive”, defends Klima, who on the store’s Instagram profile poses next to Travis Barker – drummer of the band Blink-182 – or the rapper Drake.
But you don’t have to be rich and famous to be passionate about this trend. Its commercial success, in fact, lies largely in the consumers of the new generations, a priori with lower purchasing power. Even more so: perhaps they don’t have the money to buy a house, so what they have is used to indulge in a treat with great symbolic value for them. “It is not that young people live in opulence, but that their spending is made in apparently more frivolous categories because it is impossible for them to access the rest,” summarized IESE professor José Luis Nueno in an article published in 2024 in EL PAÍS.
This reality, added to the nostalgic component that so attracts new buyers, heralds a bright future for the business of used t-shirts for singers and musical groups. “We’ve grown almost the entire time we’ve been in this business,” says Klimer, who officially opened the store in 2008. WyCo Vintage has grown so much that it took pop-ups in Las Vegas or even New York Fashion Week. “The real problem for a company like ours is to continually get inventory and maintain it. That’s the challenge. But the fact is that every year you have to add another batch of jerseys to the selection, because there’s another batch of jerseys, for example, the 2006 ones, which are about to become vintage“explains.
Yes, it’s hard to digest, but the 2006 groups are already considered vintage. To give you an idea, it was the year Finland won Eurovision with the now legendary Hard Rock Hallelujah of the Lordi group —Spain brought Las Ketchup—. Another victory for the counterculture. “Wasn’t rock, at least in part, a call against unbridled consumerism and bourgeois society?” Bernstein asked in his article, questioning the reasons for purchasing, at exorbitant prices, T-shirts from groups that preach the opposite. “Well, being a T-shirt collector vintage “Today we break with the customs of rational society”, he consoled himself. T-shirts from Lordi’s 2006 tour can already be found on eBay for $75. Soon they will cost double, or more.
