b8 accepted, but only because your frame of reference here is the 90s, at which point novelty t-shirts were already a two-decade...
b8 accepted, but only because your frame of reference here is the 90s, at which point novelty t-shirts were already a two-decade old industry. FFS, my high school was offering silk-screening as an elective class before the 90s even dawned. You're not the first person to discover sex, and the 90s were not some sort of renaissance era for t-shirt selling.
Yeah, the good angle to remind me would be that puffy iron-on appliqués being a 70s thing only makes sense if there were t-shirts around. But I’ll counter that back then other men’s and especially boys casual shirt styles were more a thing – polo shirts, western shirts, even Hawaiian shirts, whereas in the 90s the t-shirt was competing with what, the bowling shirt? The black buttoned shirt with flames on the hem and an embroidered dragon?
Then you went through the whole vintage rediscovery of the 70s/80s small batch stuff, with now glowingly nostalgic local brands and retro graphic design, and on up to the graphic tee Ed Hardy era