Vintage T-Shirt Forum & Community Authentication Appraisals

I'm looking for an "expert" on Stanley DeSantis tees.

Specifically, SD did a run of licensed MAD Magazine-themed shirts in 1992. Unlike most of the SD shirts I see, many of these MAD tees do not have the SD label in them. To make authenticating these shirts more difficult, the same design can have multiple labels in them. For example, I own four units of one design--one has a Fruit of the Loom U.S. label; one has a Canadian FotL label; and two have a Sof Tee label.

The author of Collectibly MAD, Grant Geissman, shows three pages of pictures of MAD-themed SD t-shirts he tells me he bought directly, in-person at the SD warehouse, and only one of the ones shown has a SD label. The others all appear to have a FotL (US) or Sof Tee label in them. Yet, if he bought them from the warehouse, they're legit.

Most, but not all, of these shirts (including the ones I own) have "Mfg. by Stanley DeSantis" after the copyright from E.C. Publications, but that, of course, can be faked.

Any idea why SD would not put his label in most of these MAD shirts? I assume he ordered blanks (with his label sewn in) by the hundreds if not thousands, so why use blanks from so many different companies for these MAD-themed shirts?

Thanks in advance from the MAD collectors.

Good Q.

Not specifically a Stanley D expert, but we did do some coverage:

https://www.defunkd.com/stanley-desantis/

and you can see in one of his early tees - it was a FOTL tag, but that was likely before he had the infrastructure, tags, he eventually had in the 90s.

I covered this a bit in this article about sewn-in tags:

https://www.defunkd.com/sewn-in-tags/

Doesn't seem to be a cause for alarm, with a quick search I was able to find a few others that look fine without the actual tag:

https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/ ... -894750661
https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/ ... 3941401943
https://www.ebay.com/itm/304988107082

Part of it just comes down to logistics, as SD didn't manufacture his own tees, and probably had them installed at source, by say, FOTL. But sometimes the tags weren't handy or they needed to be printed on the fly, by a different screen printer. I don't know for sure, but there may have been times where he was commissioned just to do the artwork and had no involvement in distribution. I don't know if he ever was involved in that actually aside from the early days.

I've seen lots of examples of legit prints on various tags.

In your example it would be easier to authenticate based off the print. It's pretty complex colorwise with a lot of fine details that would be hard to duplicate convincingly. Gut says just by looking at the image it's ok!