oversized white t-shirts don`t get a lot of love these

OVERSIZED WHITE T-SHIRTS DON’T
GET A LOT OF LOVE THESE DAYS.
A South Los Angeles high school banned them
on campus last spring, believing they
contributed to brawls between black and
Latino students. The Texas Youth Commission
cautions parents against buying or allowing
CIARA PAYNE (5XL)
“NICK” (5XL)
OSCAR WANE SMITH (6XL)
BILLY PARRINE (LEFT, 5XL) AND
NELSON JOHNSON (4-5XL)
XXXX
PAGE 18
THE SECRET HISTORY
BY GADI DECHTER
C I T Y
P A P E R
August 10, 2005
children to wear them, warning they put kids
in “extreme danger” of street gangs. Last
January,a Maryland state’s attorney told National
Public Radio that the mere courtroom presence
of a dozen young men in matching white shirts
reduced a witness in a Baltimore murder trial
to a violent shaking fit on the stand.
LESLIE MC MICKENS (2XL)
JUSTIN MYERS (6XL)
WAISS BROWN (5XL) WITH
MAHOGANI BROWN-GARRETT
ROBERT WILSON (2XL)
XXXL
OF THE GALAXY TALL TEE
P H O T O G R A P H S BY U L I L O S KO T
August 10, 2005
C I T Y
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PAGE 19
“It has killed the business of
urban fashion,” says Pauli Singh
of the regional His and Her’s chain.
“You can sell 50 of them in a day, and
you don’t make any money.”
XXXXXXXL
The fashion police are also cracking
down. “It has killed the business of urban
clothing,” says Pauli Singh, owner of the
His and Her’s chain of 12 casual-apparel
stores in the Baltimore-Washington area.
“Absolutely killed it. You can sell 50 of
them in a day, and you don’t make any
money.” Singh’s lament is echoed by inner-city menswear retailers across the
East Coast, who decry the cheap schmatas
for sinking their business into a yearslong slump. Trend forecasters in newspapers as mainstream as the Cleveland
Plain-Dealer and The Sun have declared
the T-shirt outré, passé, wack—“Start saying your goodbyes now, menfolk,” wrote
Sun reporter Tanika White on July 11. “The
era of the T-shirt is dwindling.” An unscientific survey of young women at West
Baltimore’s Mondawmin Mall reveals
area ladies find young men in supersized,
extra-long tees look “sloppy” at best, and
“like girls” at worst.
Despite the haters—or because of them—
the gownlike shirt isn’t showing any sign
of joining the one-strapped overalls and
backward-pants in hip-hop heaven. On
125th Street in Harlem, where the predilection for huge white T-shirts probably took
root in the mid-1990s, stores like Dr. Jay’s
and Jimmy Jazz are still flooded with them,
hung on racks in clear plastic to keep them
immaculate. At the outdoor urban bazaar
that is 52nd Street in West Philadelphia,
fat three-packs of colossal tees are piled
atop peddlers’ folding tables, sold at corner bodegas, and vended out of illegally
parked cargo vans. And in Baltimore, where
the shirts are worn not only huge but also
PAGE 20
hugely long, yards of white (and, increasingly, black) cotton hang from young
black men from Pennsylvania Avenue to
Monument Street. They drape the knees
of white hoodrats in Hampden and Pigtown,
and billow like drag-racer parachutes behind teenagers racing down Greenmount
Avenue on mini-motorcycles.
Rather than shrinking in popularity, the
oversized T-shirt appears to be getting
bigger. And longer.
Galaxy, the original and leading brand
of “tall tees”—so called for their extralong cut—has recently introduced a
7XL to its line of white and colored T-shirts
(its smallest size is 2XL). Mohammed
Shakir, manager of a web site that wholesales the competing SAAD brand of oversized tees, says he’s had to inflate his
output to 8XL (that is, XXXXXXXXL) shirts
in order to meet customer demand across
the United States and as far away as
the U.S. Virgin Islands.
“I don’t know what the hell is going on,”
Shakir says. “It’s crazy.”
To get a sense of just how colossal these
shirts are, consider the case of Sun Ming
Ming, the most recent Chinese NBA hopeful. At 7 feet 8 and three-quarters inches
tall, Sun is one of the tallest living men on
the planet. He wears a 6XL jersey. So does
the comparatively petite Houston Rockets
center Yao Ming, who is 7-foot-6.
In fairness, the Galaxy tees are sized a
bit smaller than regulation basketball uniforms. According to Baltimore suit maker Victor Pascal, who recently examined
a 6XL Galaxy tall tee, it might properly fit
a man as short as 6-foot-11.
C I T Y
P A P E R
August 10, 2005
OF COURSE, TALL TEES AREN’TMARKETED
to the Legg Mason set for whom Pascal
makes custom business suits in his Light
Street store, or the overgrown. The typical tall tee wearer these days is young,
black, urban, and likely to be a hip-hop
head—although it has fans among others
who want to look “down” by dressing up.
“Hip-hop loves making as bold a statement as it possibly can,” music journalist Peter Shapiro says. “There’s the idea of
not only living large, but living extra-large,
and wearing a long shirt that goes down
to your knees is a bold statement. You’ll
get noticed.”
Shapiro speculates that the extra-long
look—and the general outsized tendencies of hip-hop fashion—is born of
a combination of foppishness and cultural economics.
“All pop-music forms have their accompanying style of dress, and there’s
been a strong strain of dandyism in them,”
Shapiro says. “African-American culture
in particular has always placed great emphasis on looking sharp.” In other words,
hip-hop fans tend to pay as much attention to their look as hip-hop artists, even
if they don’t have the kind of clothing budget multiplatinum sales provide; in a culture obsessed with credibility, street wear
and stage wear are often interchangeable. The glory of the oversized T-shirt,
then, may lie in its ability to satisfy contradictory cultural injunctions: It’s both
cheap and extravagant, all-purpose and
outrageous—and economical enough to
afford the decadent gesture of wearing it
once and throwing it away.
“No one buys just one,” says Tykisha
Washington, a sales associate at the Mondawmin Mall outlet of the Shoe City apparel chain. “They come in and buy a
dozen,” she says of the young men who’ve
made the 5XL and 6XL Galaxy tall tee the
most popular items in the store.
“If you can go to the store and buy five
shirts for $25, that’s your whole week,”
explains Myorr Janha, vice president of
marketing at urban fashion house Phat
Farm, who predicts the style has a long
shelf life ahead of it. “With jeans and a
WHITE SALE: TALL TEES ON
THE RACK AT JIMMY JAZZ IN
MONDAWMIN MALL
August 10, 2005
C I T Y
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T H E
C I T Y
P A P E R
D I G I - C A M
XXXXXXXL
PAGE 22
URBAN CANVAS: (CLOCKWISE FROM
TOP LEFT) CUSTOM PAINTED TALL
TEES IN NEW YORK CITY; A MORE
TRADITIONAL USE OF THE TALL
TEE ON SALE AT BALTIMORE’S
HOMETOWN GIRL BOUTIQUE; AND
TWO PHOTOGRAPHS OF A NEW YORK
CITY STREET SHRINE TO THE LATE
LINELL RAY PLAIR THAT
INCORPORATES A TALL TEE
C I T Y
P A P E R
August 10, 2005
pair of sneakers, you can’t go wrong in a
white tee.”
Shapiro and Janha both reject the more
sinister explanations that have dogged
hip-hop fashion trends since sagging pants
hit schoolyards in the mid-1980s: that they
mimic and glorify a violent prison culture,
where beltless cons stash contraband in
the folds of one-size-fits-all uniforms.
“Yes, it’s very easy to hide things under
baggy clothes,” Shapiro says. “Yes, you can
pack a lot of stuff under a long shirt. But I
don’t know that the style is explainable
simply as an expedient for hiding your
stash, hiding a gun, or shoplifting.”
Another oft-repeated nugget of conventional wisdom has it that the white
shirt is a sort of inner-city camouflage.
“The culture of the customer is so everyone will look the same,” says Stuart
Silberman, vice president of marketing at
Changes, a nine-store chain of urban
menswear stores based in Baltimore that
has been stocking tall tees since 2002. “If
the cops are looking for a suspect, [he’s invariably wearing a] long white T-shirt with
long shorts. So they can’t be identified.
That was the real reason it all started.”
That reasoning is double-edged, notes
Kareem “Geech” Lee, 28, a salesman at
Mitchell and Ness Nostalgia Co. in
Philadelphia, which makes the $350 vintage sports jerseys, or “throwbacks,”
that have become popular urban wear.
“The reason why I stopped wearing white
tees,” Lee explains, “is because I was arrested in 1999 for a crime I didn’t commit.
The [suspect] had on a white tee and jeans—
the same shit I had on—and he was darkskinned and short like me.”
The West Philadelphia resident says
he’s now careful to wear shirts with em-
blems on them. “In my neighborhood, we
all wear the same stuff, so me, I had to
change my dress code up,” he says, showing off his oversized green Adidas T-shirt
and matching green sneakers. “I wear different things from everybody else, so now
when [the cops] run up on me, they don’t
get confused.”
Media confusion and laziness is partly
to blame for the white shirt getting a bad
rap, says Shawn “Ceez” Caesar of Unruly
Productions Inc., an urban-entertainment
marketing company based in Hanover. “If
kids start wearing purple hoodies,” Caesar
says, “then purple hoodies would be associated [by the media] with crime.”
However unfair, the association between
oversized white T-shirts and the criminally
inclined is by now well embedded in the
cultural firmament, as evinced by the 2004
praise poem “White Tee” by Atlanta gangsta-rap outfit Dem Franchize Boyz. This
paean to the hard-core life begins, “I slang
in my white tee/ I bang in my white tee,”
and goes on to speculate that “Niggas in
the trap now/ I bet they got a white tee.”
“You want to see the uniform, eh?” smirks
a Wilmington, Del., police officer when
asked about oversized white tees on the
city’s streets. He directs a reporter to a
crime-ridden northeastern neighborhood,
where he says drug dealers have for several years adopted the white tall tee as
their professional summer attire.
Likewise, on the Greenmount Avenue
shopping strip in Waverly, a man claiming to be the proprietor of a nearby pawn
shop advises against photographing a
group of young men congregated in matching tall tees in front of a neighborhood bar.
“You better not bring that camera ’round
here,” he says, rolling his eyes and laugh-
ing maniacally. “Them hoppers jump you
right quick.”
Those who do value the shirt for its thuglife imprimatur—like the trio of tall-teed
preteen boys in Hampden who recently
declined to have their picture taken because they suspected that a female photographer with blond dreadlocks and an
Austrian accent was a “fucking fed”—
might be interested to know that their
manly threads are actually women’s sleeping gowns.
HENRY ABADI NEVER SET OUT TO
establish a fashion brand, much less
one that would become a mark of
thug credibility.
Born in 1947, in Aleppo, Syria, Abadi studied engineering but was unable to find
work because of state restrictions against
Jews. Neither could he legally leave the
country. In 1971, he determined to escape
and hired a smuggler to sneak him across
the Lebanese border.
Disguised in a djellabah, the traditional
Arab robe, and half-blind without his glasses, Abadi, his smuggler, and another desperate émigré boarded a bus filled with
Syrian soldiers en route to Lebanon for a
weekend furlough. “Of course it was dangerous,” Abadi, now 58, says in the
Manhattan showroom of Harvic
International Ltd., which manufactures
the Galaxy brand of tall tees. “But when
you’re 24 you’re not afraid of anything.”
The escape went off, although Abadi’s
father was held for more than two weeks
in one of a network of underground prisons run by Syrian secret police, until the
family was able to bribe his release. From
Lebanon, Abadi traveled south to Israel.
There he was able to find dangerous work
maintaining electrical towers, but loneliness drew him after eight months to the
United States, where his older sister lived.
Like countless immigrants before him,
Abadi took the first job he was offered,
manning a table outside his brother-inlaw’s discount clothing store on Broadway
in Brooklyn, N.Y. It was Abadi’s first introduction to African-American culture.
“At that time,” he says, speaking in a quiet, still-thick Syrian accent, “Broadway
was the Harlem of Brooklyn. The Afro was
the fashion. Even you would see white
women come and buy the Afro wig and
put it on.”
After a year of observing the discount
retail trade, Abadi decided to strike out
on his own. He borrowed money to open
his first shop, a children’s clothing store
named Princessa, on Avenue A at 14th
Street in Manhattan.
“It was a lousy area,” he says of the nowgentrified Alphabet City neighborhood
east of the East Village. “A forbidden area.
Even the police wouldn’t dare go inside.”
The business struggled. When his lease
expired in 1977, Abadi moved to Jamaica,
Queens, where he tried his hand at selling children’s clothing and linens to the
mothers in the predominantly poor, black
neighborhood. This outing was even less
successful than Princessa, so Abadi repaired back to Manhattan, this time to
another struggling neighborhood, Spanish
Harlem. In tune with the priorities of
his poor and working-class customers, he
called his new store Saverama.
“I remember the day we opened,” he
says, with obvious pride. “June 18, 1978.”
Abadi still owns Saverama, which sells
discount clothes for the whole family.
In a fitting bookend to Abadi’s retail ad-
Henry Abadi never set out to
establish a fashion brand, much less
one that would become a mark
of thug credibility.
August 10, 2005
C I T Y
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XXXXXXXL
ventures, it’s currently managed by another brother-in-law.
Having finally produced a profitable enterprise, Abadi determined to leverage
his retail expertise into a wholesale venture less exposed to the vagaries of location. In 1983, he teamed up with a partner
to form Harvic International. Their first
imports were cheap sneakers from Taiwan
that came emblazoned with the name
Galaxy, which they sold to “off-price”
mom-and-pop clothing chains and lowend department stores. Soon after, Harvic
began importing commodity-clothing
items like boxer shorts and swimming
trunks and had them emblazoned with
the Galaxy name, for which Harvic had
registered a trademark.
Business was good, but hardly booming. In 1985, on a tip from a departmentstore buyer friend, Abadi ordered from
Chinese suppliers his first batch of extra-long, oversized T-shirts. Known in
the industry as 40-inch shirts—to distinguish them from the conventional 33inch length made by underwear brands
such as Hanes and Fruit of the Loom—
the huge tees were becoming popular as
“dorm shirts” for girls.
“I used to bring the blanks and they
would print on them to sell to chain stores,”
Abadi says. “They used to print on it a lot
of beautiful things”—cartoon characters
and flowers.
Abadi removes a 6XL Galaxy tee from a
hanger in the showroom and spreads it
out on a conference table, to explain its
success as a sleeping shirt. “All our T-shirts
are tubular, you see?” he says. “No seam,
which makes it easy to print on.” The shirts
also have a tight neck, relative to their
PAGE 24
size, and are made of heavier cotton—between 170 and 180 grams per square meter—than a typical undershirt. These same
characteristics would one day be prized
by an entirely different customer base.
DURING MUCH OF THE 1990S—SALAD
days, apparently, for the dorm shirt—
Harvic imported about 500,000 of them
a year. On the strength of that one item,
the company was able to branch out into
entire lines of discount clothing, including the Chinese-made school uniforms
RAG TRADE: CLINTON MEN’S SHOP
SALESMAN “BIG NOID” (LEFT) WITH
THE GARMENT THAT THE NEWARK,
N.J., STORE HELPED MAKE
POPULAR, WITH OWNER JOSEPH
STEINER (RIGHT).
and inexpensive men’s business wear it
still wholesales nationwide under the
generic names Authentic School Uniform,
Modern Classic, Enrico Bertucci, and
Clarenzo Muzzi, among others.
By 2000, however, the dorm-shirt market had fizzled, and Abadi had stopped
importing them. He had only a few hundred of them left in his Brooklyn warehouse when he received an unusual order
for the item—from a menswear retailer
in inner-city Newark, N.J., who wanted
1,000 pieces.
On the promise of that small order, Abadi
says, he immediately placed a call to his
Chinese supplier and ordered them to
“What do I know why they want
it long,” Clinton Men’s Shop’s
Joseph Steiner says. “I only wish
my beytzim were so long.”
C I T Y
P A P E R
August 10, 2005
manufacture 60,000-dozen more.
“He said he was a very good barometer,”
Abadi says of Clinton Men’s Shop owner
Joseph Steiner, who placed that first order.
“Because he sells strictly hip-hop or whatever we call it. Street wear.”
Steiner told Abadi that young black men
in Newark were suddenly asking for their
white T-shirts long, very long.
Abadi took a chance on Steiner’s ear-tothe-street, and the gamble paid off. “All of
a sudden, I start getting calls,” he says.
“Young black men, hustlers or peddlers in
Harlem, they start to call on me, because
they’ve seen the shirt somewhere. I start
getting calls from everywhere, from Georgia.
This is 2000, 2001.”
For a guy who reportedly touted himself
as a bellwether in hip-hop trends, Joseph
Steiner neither looks nor acts the part. The
elderly Hungarian immigrant has been
running Clinton Men’s Shop for almost 35
years in a run-down section of Newark
that appears, by the number of hand-painted advertisements lining Clinton Street,
to specialize in car-window tinting.
“What do I know why they want it long?”
Steiner says, waving a weary hand at
the few customers browsing the 5,000square-foot store, which is crammed floor
to ceiling with shirts, jeans, and sneakers.
“It’s a fashion for these youngsters.” Steiner
turns to his son, who’s manning the cash
register. “Why they like the T-shirt long?”
“I have no clue,” mumbles Steve Steiner,
29. “They want it, so we get it.”
Joseph Steiner shrugs. “There’s your answer. I only wish my beytzim were so
long,” he sighs, using the Yiddish word
for testicles.
Steiner discounts his role in establishing Galaxy as the tall-tee brand of choice.
It’s Henry Abadi who’s the genius, he says,
jokingly referring to the Harvic chief as a
“big gonif,” or thief. “But don’t tell him I
said so,” Steiner quickly adds. “He’s a good
man. And a hell of a businessman.” He taps
the side of his head. “Very shrewd.”
Back in New York, Abadi was having a
hard time persuading his sales staff that
their signature women’s nightshirt was
an emerging hit with the hypermasculine
urban-wear crowd. “My boys didn’t want
to promote it,” he says, so he took 20-year-
old salesman Eli Cohen to a public school
at 33rd Street and Third Avenue.
“I said, ‘Eli, you see these black guys, you
see these young students? They’re all wearing Galaxy,” Abadi recalls. “Eli said, ‘Oh,
come on, get out of here.’” So the older man
beckoned to one of the kids on the playground. “I said to him, ‘Tell me, my man,
tell me what you’re wearing.’” Abadi smiles
at the memory. “The kid says, ‘Galaxy. Only
the best.’”
Now Harvic’s chief salesman, Cohen,
25, smirks when he hears about other
doubters, such as Baltimore’s Downtown
Locker Room chain, which has decided
against manufacturing its oversized LuxeT shirt in a 40-inch version. “They’re missing out on sales,” he sniffs. “Everybody’s
ordering it, and reordering it, so it’s obviously selling.”
Abadi won’t disclose Harvic’s sales figures, though in an early phone conversation Cohen put the annual number of white
Galaxy tall-tee sales at 3 million. Abadi
says it’s between 1 million and 2 million,
but won’t get more specific. The company
employs 28 people in its Manhattan head-
quarters and Brooklyn warehouse.
In addition to the Galaxy tall tees, which
are now made in 20 colors, Harvic has expanded the Galaxy line to include the full
complement of casual urban men’s pieces,
including down jackets, square-backed
camouflage tank tops, oversized solid-color polos, and striped button-down shirts.
But the tall tee’s status as king of the line
is clearly felt. A glass case on the Harvic
showroom table displays magazine clippings picturing athletes and rap icons such
as Sean “P Diddy” Combs rocking the tall
tee, and a 2003 New York Times story about
its use as a canvas for custom airbrush designs by graffiti artists.
Lately, the dorm shirt turned man-shirt
has spawned another gender-bending
fashion transformation.
“It has driven the shorts to be longer,
too,” says Andy Goetz, president of the
Changes store chain. “So now we sell capris
to men, because they need to have their
shorts visible below the shirt. Otherwise
it looks like a dress.”
Galaxy has recently come out with camouflage-print capri pants for men. ★
READY TO WEAR: TALL TEES ON SALE
AT THE CLINTON MEN’S SHOP
August 10, 2005
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