If you’re a sucker for authentic vintage t shirts, you’ve probably realized the way the near-gravitational forces of hype and the marketplace can often form and garble our way of thinking about words. While this certainly won’t be of much concern when picking between a pizza sauce that features a “distinctive new flavor” and another that claims a “scrumptious new taste,” a minimal deviation in wording could present a gargantuan difference when adding more items to your vintage tshirt collection. Still, exploring the slight contrast between two innocuous words could stop you from making a quite huge but dreadfully common blunder.

The word “vintage,” for example, is meant to refer to something that was definitely put together at a precise time in years gone by, such as a whiskey of a certain vintage. Or a vintage 1965 Cadillac Convertible Deville. Or even those vintage Led Zeppelin t shirts that have been part of your wardrobe since you were a teenager.

“Retro,” by contrast, refers to an object that is completed newly but is a nod to a prior fashion. Retro is essentially a reissue or representation of a vintage item, but is not manifestly vintage itself. Newly crafted Hammer pants are retro. Sideburns are retro. Neon-colored leg warmers are retro. Lamentable, but retro.

To state it more clearly, if you enter a thrift shop and buy some 80s tees that were actually manufactured back before Rick Astley was an internet meme, those are vintage. If you hit Spencer’s Gifts and invest in a new black t-shirt with a Dr. Seuss character on it, that’s retro.

Straightforward, right? So how come all this confusion? Well, a percentage of the confusion is that, to large amounts of pubescent people, “vintage” and “retro” are merely dual strains of “old.” Is that vintage Star Wars tee shirt awesome because the shirt is old, or because the flick is old? Are those vintage concert t shirts cool because they came from the actual performance, or because the bands are retro fashionable? A teen generally doesn’t give it much scrutiny and creates no distinction between the two.

Another chunk of the problem is commercial relations. Retro tee shirts are a humongous fad at this time. The logos and concepts of lovable classics of days gone by have emerged as profoundly beloved yet again. As a matter of fact, they’ve turned out to be so well-liked that innumerable tshirt designers have ceased the practice of simply utilizing a Thundercats, Guinness, or Ramones logo, and instead begun to create the t shirts in a way that makes them look as if they’ve been previously used, exceptionally cherished, and definitely distressed. The result is retro tee shirts that look like authentic vintage t shirts but really aren’t.

So, what the heck is a simple devotee of vintage t shirts supposed to do? Well, you can be positive you discern the difference between the words “vintage” and “retro.” You can make certain to go over product presentations warily, staying aware of things like “licensed t-shirts” (which would imply that the authorization to apply the configuration, characters, and/or ideas was purchased but the shirt itself was in all likelihood done not so long ago). And, just to verify, you can always communicate with the tee shirt establishment and question them honestly about whether their t-shirts are only retro or unambiguously vintage.

Obviously, if you aren’t a hobbyist or a stickler, maybe not a bit of this matters to you. Who else but a collector actually aches to purchase a 21-year old t-shirt? I mean, unlike a vintage coin, certain possessions aren’t actually projected to be functional 20 years later. In other words, clothing. And, super particularly, popularly priced tshirts. It could be a retro t shirt categorically is the finest of both worlds.

Or could be I’m just feeling nostalgic. Some fragment of me longs for a day when the tag “vintage” would be entirely and precisely applied to my voyages out to purchase discontinued sci-fi novels and eighties tees, rather than used to egg on the “whatever’s ancient-looking is cool” kink. I suppose I’m just old.

Hang on – does that make me cool?

Well, no matter what style of shirt you desire, you can see cool vintage tees, retro tshirts, and vintage-looking retro t shirts at Channel Shirt, where all the primo classic and funny t shirts on the web live. See you there!

Dave Sylvester designs and collects funny tee shirts for a living. If vintage tee shirts are cool and valuable, then Dave’s closet full of honest-to-god eighties vintage band tee shirts makes him the coolest, richest dude in the universe. Good-looking too. Get to know him at ChannelShirt.com.