I acquired this shirt in 2004 when I first got in to the vintage clothing business. I was exiting the bar racket and ready for a new adventure. Coincidentally the real estate agent executing the sale of my bar had recently met a gentleman who was well versed in vintage. She described an amazing warehouse full of antique clothing that was renown for supplying the film industry throughout the 1990s. Thirsty for knowledge and starved for inventory I asked to be connected with him as soon as possible. She told me it was downtown and asked me where I lived. When I told her my street name her eyes bulged out of her head, “well you wont have to go far, the warehouse is located on your street!” I told her I lived at #22 and she was even more excited to report he was located at #24. How could this be possible? There were no warehouses on my street and #24 was just an old low-rise apartment building. “Actually it’s 24A, you have to go down an alley” she explained.
Turns out she was right, it was directly across the street, fate only a few steps from home. Behind the apartment building rested a coach house I had never seen in almost 10 years of living adjacent to it. I quickly scheduled a meeting with the gentleman who operated the business. A few days later he took me on a tour and my eyes did a lot of bulging of their own. We explored two levels, multiple rooms and I got my first glimpse at what I believe to be the best collection of vintage clothing in the world.
I mentioned I had a specific interest in vintage t-shirts so our final stop in this museum-esque venue was a rack filled with them. They were all gems but this Big Jim ringer immediately caught my eye. I explained to him that Big Jim was a nickname my father gave me as a kid. He used it every chance got, on every card and during every introduction, “meet Big Jim” he would say. I loved it, because lil’ dudes always long to be big guys. The curator told me that Big Jim was a line of action figures that were popular in the early 1970s. Not only was he an expert in vintage clothing but also of vintage toys and a vast selection of other collectibles. Indeed the shirt was sized for a child and with closer inspection I noticed tiny print below the image which read “©1974 Mattel Canada”. That’s the year I was born. At that moment it occurred to me that this toy may have been the inspiration for my nickname. Well versed in appraising sentimental value he took it off the rack and handed it to me as a gift. In the days and years that followed he would go on to be an important mentor to me as well as a good friend. The t-shirt has always been the most closely guarded one in my collection.
As to whether the Big Jim toy is responsible for the nickname my father gave me, I can’t say for sure. I haven’t seen my father since I was 15 years old. Hopefully one day I will get to ask him in person.
My rubber pop-out Alien t-shirt was one of those treasures of youth which was too special to be worn most of the time. Shooting out from the middle of the chest is an exquisitely detailed rubber replica of the worm-like monster which pops out of the chest of character Kane (played by John Hurt) during dinner. A notoriously disgusting horror moment and one of the few truly graphic horror moments of any blockbuster film of the era. With the exception of Night of The Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1978), few mega-hit films featured gore this graphic. Such splatter was generally consigned only to low-budget horror and grindhouse films. Alien changed the cinematic landscape entirely in this regard, ushering in a grotesque Grand Guignol era in Hollywood film which has never really abated.
Stanley Mouse is an American artist who has had two distinct phases in a career that’s influenced pop culture for decades. As a teenager, he and guys like Ed “Big Daddy” Roth were part of the emerging hot rod art movement of the late 1950’s. Stanley would travel to custom car shows selling air-brushed t-shirts and sweatshirts featuring his crazed hot rod jockeys. Eventually, he opened Mouse Studios in Detroit and sold air-brushed hot rod shirts via mail order.
Gary Numan has Asperger’s Syndrome, and so do I. We’re on a a “high-functioning” part of the autistic spectrum, misunderstand social rules and have problems interacting with others. This makes his career- and this shirt- poignant to me. Once one of the biggest acts in Britain, his inability to muzzle it made him the music press’s whipping boy; when success left him, he struggled to find a new image. This is his “Mad Max” look, in which he tries ever so hard to look tough and somehow can’t quite do it.
When ‘Easy Rider’, the movie, came out in 1969 I was 19 years old and living in London while studying at the famed Morris School of Hairdressing. The school was situated in the heart of Soho, directly opposite Paul Raymond’s Revue Bar. What a location! One could look out of the upper floor school windows and see directly into the Revue Bar dancers’ changing room windows across the road!
My mother grew up in San Francisco, and in 1976 she moved our family back to San Francisco from Vermont, where we’d been living. My grandmother, Jane Swinerton Ophuls, moved us into a Victorian she’d restored in the rough-and-tumble Western Addition — this was back when all the abject highrise projects dominated the landscape — and my education about poverty and opportunity began.
