The 90s hip-hop T-shirt is back – with a twist

Paying homage … Aidy Bryant wears a T-shirt displaying pictures of Charles Melton at the Film Independent Spirit awards. Photograph: Kevin Winter/Getty Images

Ariana Atwater, a customer service associate at Bloomingdale’s in New York City, grew up in the US south, where “rap tees” – shirts highlighting hip-hop’s biggest artists – were nearly ubiquitous. The 32-year-old remembers buying Bow Wow and Jeezy garb, but last autumn, she added a far less famous face to her wardrobe: her boyfriend, Aaron.

Atwater customised a $30 (£25) shirt with his name in huge, orange ombré text above images of his face and wore the shirt as a surprise for his birthday. “I just wanted to find something cool and cute to celebrate him,” she says.

Atwater is part of a growing number of people paying homage to 90s hip-hop fashion with a 21st-century twist. Similar to music fans in the 90s, today’s shoppers buy bootleg T-shirts to honour the subjects highlighted on the tees. But instead of Biggie, brides-to-be and birthday boys can now easily slap their names and images on these shirts, making them feel like a superstar.

These bootleg rap T-shirts are being sold via Etsy and TikTok Shop. Online stores such as London-based Studio Sunnie have sold more than a thousand T-shirts displaying everything from multiple images of someone’s sister to pet cats.

It is as nostalgia obsessions grow that these shirts have re-emerged. Last September, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West’s daughter North West wore a black shirt with her name in sparkly, uppercase letters above pictures of herself, while former Saturday Night Live cast member Aidy Bryant and May December actor Charles Melton wore bootleg shirts bearing each other’s names during the Film Independent Spirit awards in February. Influencers have also taken to posting customised bootleg T-shirts of their own faces online, sparking a micro-trend.

“It was a trend on TikTok to surprise your boyfriend or husband with it,” says Emily Bogaudo, a 28-year-old dietician in Detroit, Michigan, who bought a customised T-shirt featuring her name and photos for her husband. “People wanted to make videos to get their reaction.”

Before they became go-to gifts for boyfriends, savvy entrepreneurs hawked the designs, featuring rappers, to fans outside concert venues, often unsanctioned by the artists. “It was just people looking to make some money,” says Ross Schwartzman, a prolific rap tee collector and the author of Rap Tees: A Collection of Hip-Hop T-Shirts 1980-1999. “They usually sold for not too much and a lot of times they would be confiscated at the shows.”

They took off between 1994 and 1996, according to Schwartzman, as the careers of hip-hop luminaries such as Nas, Notorious BIG and Tupac soared and fans flocked to buy their apparel. The look, complete with bright colours and an in-your-face collage of portraits, quickly became hip-hop iconography.

During hip-hop’s early days, popular labels such as Bad Boy Records and Death Row Records would sometimes hand out rap merchandise that promoted new albums, according to Steve Stoute, a longtime hip-hop executive and founder of music distributor UnitedMasters.

“It wasn’t looked at as a fashion statement. It was a promotional statement,” he says. “It was not seen as a business. In fact, they were giving the shirts away back then.” Nowadays, some of those free shirts trade for thousands of dollars.

As the everyman’s name and face has supplanted celebrities, the buyer pool has expanded beyond hip-hop fans and, despite legendary artists helping to solidify the shirt’s iconic status, the style’s music-laced history has been somewhat erased. Many TikTok and Instagram videos featuring the customised shirts neglect to mention their origins.

“There may be people who are wearing them that can’t trace back the story to where they originally came from,” says Evan Auerbach, a hip-hop archivist. “But they wear them because it’s taken on this secondary look and feel of what’s cool.”

Stoute cites how many Louis Vuitton customers don’t know the fashion house’s history as a baggage maker for travellers trekking by horse-drawn carriage in the 19th century. “I can’t hold the customer accountable for understanding the base knowledge of something. What I can do is say that it is a big moment for hip-hop,” he says. “It’s an individual fashion item and it’s not even related to the artist or the song or anything. It’s related to the fact that it actually looks good.”

If a love for hip-hop history isn’t driving sales, then perhaps it is self-reflective shirts’ rising popularity. Fashion such as Hailey Bieber’s “Nepo Baby” tee and Kardashian’s bootleg T-shirt featuring her sister Kendall Jenner’s rumoured exes may have pushed consumers to buy self-aware gear of their own.

While some treat the garish shirts as throwaway gimmicks, others appreciate their modish style. Wyatt Remillard, Bogaudo’s husband, didn’t grow up a hip-hop fan, but he nevertheless appreciates his wife’s birthday surprise, which features her face all over the tee.

“I wear this every opportunity I get,” he says. “I would say I sometimes overwear it.”