All the shirts seem to be pledging allegiance to something. We don’t know what, but “The Democratic Republic of Attractive Fabrics” probably wasn’t it.  Or the shirts are acting out the posture of the boys who will wear them: Me? You think I picked this out? My Mom made me wear this. I had a Led Zep T-shirt and she shrunk it in the wash on purpose.

I’m sure this was Sears’ patented SupR-Itch fabric, annoyingly thin, with Perma-Strech elastic that lost its shape after you jammed the sleeves up to your elbow half a dozen times. The most appalling touch, though,  wasn’t the elastic shirt cuffs. It was the elastic around the waist. It always rode up, and if you didn’t wear a shirt underneath you were always yanking the damned thing down over your belt. The very sight of that elastic waist drags me right back to 1974, standing in a high school somewhere in North Dakota on a Saturday morning, beginning a debate about lowering the speed limit, feeling the unmistakable itch of contact dermatitis. I think everyone got hives from their clothing in those days; the stuff was made from chemicals that came in drums that used to say AGENT ORANGE but now said FABRIC-MAKING BOY-CLAD FLUID.

Note Sears’ excellent sense of the vernacular: the clothes were available at the “Put-on Shop.” Because they were something you put on, of course. But “Put-on” was hip talk for a lie, a phony scene,  falsehood imposed on the People by the Man, man.  The Peter-Max graphics attemptedto assure Male Teens they were not being co-opted by the Establishment, and for the most part we bought it. Or rather we wore it. Mom bought it.