Vintage T-Shirt Forum & Community Authentication Appraisals

Hey, new here.

I bought an embroidered NIN shirt about a month ago from a Ukraine vintage seller on ebay. It’s all single-stitched and has the “J. Artist Management” copyright info on the back. I was kinda suspicious though, since it’s in such great condition. Practically deadstock. After doing some searching on Worthpoint, the embroidered versions of this design all have the same tag, etc.





Yesterday, I received a Broken shirt with the FOTL tag. As far as I know, this would be the first run, as the majority of Broken shirts are on All Sport blanks. This shirt has definitely seen some things, and I have no doubt it’s legit.




My questioning of the first shirt starts when I noticed that the Broken tag has “Adult” under the size, along with a slightly different design/font and care instructions. All of the Worthpoint archives of the first shirt match my tag though.

Does anyone know which version of this tag came first? Or if the first one is even legit? The first shirt is also available with the front screenprinted, which is the more common version. I know this was available before Broken came out. Not sure which version came first though or if bootleggers would even opt towards embroidery over printing.

Man, great question, but I'm not aware if anyone has ever done a deep dive into "adult" vs it not being there. Both tags look legit at first glance. I will say, that counterfeiters do embroidery too - but in this case, it has screen printing in addition to embroidery. So they would have been making a lot of extra effort to do something that isn't as sought after. I feel like embroidery can be a turn-off to tee buyers - I'm not a big fan of it - it's usually scratchy and uncomfortable on the other side, and often doesn't hold up well when ashing and drying it.

Very good point, regarding the trouble of doing both screenprinting and embroidery for a bootleg. The embroidered version is more appealing to me though, due to it’s scarcity.

I think I might have answered my own question as well. I did a search for “Nine Inch Nails Fruit of the Loom” on Worthpoint and was reminded of this design:




This shirt was never printed past 1990, and it’s missing “Adult” on the tag.

The only instance I can find of the embroidered shirt is on this Summer ‘93 newsletter form:



Both shirts I’m questioning are on here, but with the above shirt’s tag, I have to assume “Adult” was added later.

Awesome sleuthing! Have you taken a stroll through our FOTL gallery? A lot of the shirts are labelled with a date so you can help pin point the adult addition, although my initial scan shows it even being present early, so not sure if any sense can be made of it.

https://www.defunkd.com/brand/fruit-of-the-loom/

I think you're safe on the adult / no-adult issue. There were multiple variations of those tags in any given year and some had Adult and some didn't...who knows why. The only thing that looked funky to me about the tag on the embroidered shirt was that there was so much blank white space on the left side, but probably just mis-centered during printing.

I hope you’re right in it just being mis-centered. After going through the FOTL tag history on defunkd, I’m just more confused, since there doesn’t seem to be a distinct timeline.

Rather than making a new thread, I wanted to throw my latest acquisition into the mix:





The tag itself looks legit, but going off of googling, this is a tag from the late 80’s. The Downward Spiral was released in 1994. I searched Worthpoint for Oneita Downward Spiral shirts, and I only came up with tags that match the year. They have more info printed on the tag than this one. I did find an image of Oneita tag history that states that this tag was still used during the mid 1990’s though.



It doesn’t show the “Sewn In Mexico” part of the tag though. So, I’m unsure if this is legit or just printed on a vintage blank. The shirt itself is single-stitched all-around, for what it’s worth. Plus the various holes adding to the character of a potentially rare/vintage shirt. The majority of legit shirts of this design available all feature an All Sport tag. If this is even older than the Oneita shirts documented, it could be even rarer.