You've seen them in magazines like Rolling Stone, NME, and Spin. You remember the iconic tour photos and the covers of the aforementioned magazines. Now you can have them. The t-shirts, not the stars themselves (that would just be too much of a dream come true, in some cases). Designer Steve Coe, creator of Worn Free, realizes that images such as the one you see with this article "have meaning, not just to fans of these artists, but to everyone." 

What a great idea, to be able to buy things like Kurt Cobain's Olympia Beer shirt or a precise reproduction of John Lennon's "Working Class Hero" tee.  These shirts allow fans and collectors to add an additional layer to their already expansive stacks of LPs, CDs and MP3s. Each shirt comes with a hang-tag that tells the history of the image that graces it.

Joan Jett's peacock t-shirt made its way to my mailbox a few weeks back, and it is as if a piece of The Runaways is in my hands and in my dresser drawer. It's a high quality shirt, and very comfortable. I could wear one of these every day (if my job allowed me to come to work in a t-shirt all the time). But cool, comfortable shirts come at an uncomfortable price. Worn Free shirts range from $30-$50, which is a little rich for my modest clothing budget.

In Worn Free's defense, there is a lot of legal work that must go on behind the scenes to put these shirts on regular folks' backs. Coe obtains the rights to the artwork and the permission of the artist (or, in the case of the deceased, their estates) before heading to the screenprinter's shop.

So, for those of you who haven't found that perfect obscure summer camp shirt at the thrift store, you can pick up a Worn Free Frank Zappa "Frog Hollow Day Camp" shirt and make up a really cool story about how "Zappa had the same shirt and I went there as a kid, I can't believe the shirt still fits!"

Check out all the options, from various icons over the last 40 years of music, at wornfree.com.

Tags: Worn Free