Category: Bootlegs

In today’s day and age, where vintage t-shirts are fetching top dollar, dishonest people are using every trick in the book to fool us. Due to an influx of convincing counterfeit tags in the last decade, we recently authored a guide to authenticating a t-shirt using the tag. And we also started an archive of fake tags project so you can easily spot them in the wild. But what if the counterfeiter extracts a genuine vintage tag from another shirt – and installs it into a fake? What is a Sewn-in tag? This is the practice of installing a foreign ... Read more

In preparation for the launch of our forthcoming vintage t-shirt authentication app, Legiteem8, we set out to determine authentication knowledge among the community. So we devised a quiz with 22 authenticity-related questions to put the community’s knowhow to the test. We also wanted to reward those who performed well with a badge bump, or two, within the app once it launches. Legiteem8 features a badge system that rates members’ performance over time, but we wanted to hit the ground running at launch – and pre-populate the app with users who are already savvy authenticators. 310 people participated. No one scored ... Read more

Meet Gary “X”. By the way – the suspicious-looking guy above isn’t him. He’s just some random vintage dude whose face we blackbar’d to make this article more cloak and dagger-like. The photo is fake but Gary and his pioneering career as a bootlegger are legit. He began bootlegging as a teenager back in the 70s. He traveled throughout the U.S. learning the ins and outs of the intellectual property piracy trade. He knew when to hold ’em, when to fold ’em, knew when to walk away and when to run. Regardless of whether or not the artists received financial ... Read more

And now the chilling conclusion to the Can You Spot a Fake Vintage T-Shirt challenge. Could our vintage t-shirt loving readers correctly answer our poll on fake vintage t-shirts? Nope! Not very many of you did. Check out the fourth addition to our series of guides Vintage T-Shirts 104: How to “Spot” a Fake for the big reveal. After reading it you might say, “Hey! That’s not fair you tricked us!” Perhaps a little, but I just employed the exact same type of deception that these shifty vendors do, so let this be a lesson to ya! Take Our Poll