When and where were t-shirts common on college campuses
December 11, 2018 7:43 AM Subscribe
I'm trying to find out more information (their popularity and context) about this t-shirt design that I associate with universities and colleges in the USA.
From what I recall, these t-shirts generally had the design of:
White
100% cotton
3-4 capitalized letters that were an abbreviation for the college/university
a line immediately below the abbreviation
name of the college/university underneath
writing of text were generally the university colors
Did you own of these types of shirts? If so, when and where did you own it?
Any memories that you have with them?
What year(s) were they worn and sold and when did their popularity peak?
Were they ever really popular and worn by college students (seen on campus)? Were they only worn by jocks? townies? alums?
Where were these typically sold at? (college bookstores? K-Mart? a specific manufacturer? )
Were they available at many different colleges/universities? Only a specific region of the country? Countries besides the USA?
Is a there a term for these specific design/layout of t-shirts?
After not seeing such a shirt for an untold number of years, I saw this t-shirt and it, for some reason, immediately evoked memories of the mid to late 1990s of American campuses although I was not yet an adolescent and didn't spend much time in them. Is my mind playing tricks on me?
I don't recall seeing these shirts at all on campus as a college student in the late 00s or the present-day.
From what I recall, these t-shirts generally had the design of:
White
100% cotton
3-4 capitalized letters that were an abbreviation for the college/university
a line immediately below the abbreviation
name of the college/university underneath
writing of text were generally the university colors
Did you own of these types of shirts? If so, when and where did you own it?
Any memories that you have with them?
What year(s) were they worn and sold and when did their popularity peak?
Were they ever really popular and worn by college students (seen on campus)? Were they only worn by jocks? townies? alums?
Where were these typically sold at? (college bookstores? K-Mart? a specific manufacturer? )
Were they available at many different colleges/universities? Only a specific region of the country? Countries besides the USA?
Is a there a term for these specific design/layout of t-shirts?
After not seeing such a shirt for an untold number of years, I saw this t-shirt and it, for some reason, immediately evoked memories of the mid to late 1990s of American campuses although I was not yet an adolescent and didn't spend much time in them. Is my mind playing tricks on me?
I don't recall seeing these shirts at all on campus as a college student in the late 00s or the present-day.
The hats were made by "The Game" and were definitely a thing in the mid-late '90s. At my Midwestern college a look-at-me-I'm-a-cool-guy move was to wear the COCKS/South Carolina hat with a torn up front.
posted by AgentRocket at 8:29 AM on December 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by AgentRocket at 8:29 AM on December 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
Hats in this style were popular in my high school years. I lived in Northern Virginia and graduated in 1993. They were so popular that my spouse and I - we met in 1997 in the same region - used "white hat" as shorthand for the rafts of preppy/fratty/jocky types readily found in certain Arlington bars at that time.
posted by jocelmeow at 8:30 AM on December 11, 2018 [4 favorites]
posted by jocelmeow at 8:30 AM on December 11, 2018 [4 favorites]
(edited to add that nearly everyone understood that it was not a cool-guy move at all in reality. But it was a handy signifier.)
posted by AgentRocket at 8:30 AM on December 11, 2018
posted by AgentRocket at 8:30 AM on December 11, 2018
Oh, the mention of the COCKS hat brought this back. I definitely saw those in high school in the Northeastern US in the mid-90's, but do not remember them in college in the Northeastern US in the late 90's/early 00's, or at any campus I've studied or worked at since. I don't remember a t-shirt at all.
posted by tchemgrrl at 8:52 AM on December 11, 2018
posted by tchemgrrl at 8:52 AM on December 11, 2018
Ha! As it happens I attended Kalamazoo ("K") College, so I can certainly fill you in on this particular one, which I believe is from sometime between about 1998 and 2005. K adopted the Palatino all-caps rendering of the name (as shown in the second line) in the early 90s. They were also still pretty dug into their orange and black color scheme at that time, until probably 2005-10, when I think there was an industry-wide switch to university and pro sports logo gear in custom colors, especially blue and pink. Finally, I think they didn't really get into the "zoo" abbreviation until 2000 or later, but I could be off and it could be as early as like 1998. Prior to that it was K, Kalamazoo, or Hornets. Others may be right that "zoo" here invokes frat house names; K has no Greek system so I'm not super familiar with that.
Other info not unique to K: shirts like this are pretty generally worn, not exclusive to jocks, but mostly focused on students (and I guess faculty and staff), not so much townies. In my experience only the very major universities get much uptake among townies in their logo wear. Typically sold at the college bookstore; the local stores would often have cheaper logo wear but again, only for large universities. Allowing for slight variations, I think shirts of this style were popular across the US and not unique to any particular region.
posted by Joey Buttafoucault at 10:00 AM on December 11, 2018 [3 favorites]
Other info not unique to K: shirts like this are pretty generally worn, not exclusive to jocks, but mostly focused on students (and I guess faculty and staff), not so much townies. In my experience only the very major universities get much uptake among townies in their logo wear. Typically sold at the college bookstore; the local stores would often have cheaper logo wear but again, only for large universities. Allowing for slight variations, I think shirts of this style were popular across the US and not unique to any particular region.
posted by Joey Buttafoucault at 10:00 AM on December 11, 2018 [3 favorites]
Ha , I'm such a relic that I didn't even realize this t-shirt design looked especially dated.
posted by elgee at 10:27 AM on December 11, 2018
posted by elgee at 10:27 AM on December 11, 2018
Best answer: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA ‘COCKS’ HAT
They’re mostly forgotten today, but during the late 1980s and early 1990s — before the market was dominated by Nike and Under Armour — The Game Headwear was one of the most prominent college sports brands in the country. The Game sold a variety of college-branded fan goods — T-shirts, hoodies and jackets, as well as knickknacks such as candy tins and keychains. But its most popular product by far was its signature “bar” hat.posted by jocelmeow at 10:56 AM on December 11, 2018 [2 favorites]
[...]
Bar hats were ubiquitous on college campuses, especially among the frat-boy set, and especially in the Southeast, where the company was founded and is still headquartered today.
"white hat" was definitely another way of saying frat dude in the 90's, at least amongst my college aged nerdo crowd.
posted by mandymanwasregistered at 12:00 PM on December 11, 2018
posted by mandymanwasregistered at 12:00 PM on December 11, 2018
Best answer: The above commenters are correct: this is a shirt that, if not made by The Game, is directly ripping off a design from The Game. (Bootleg ripoffs were common.) It's called "The Bar", and it's mostly a design for baseball caps, although t-shirts (and polo shirts!) did exist in the 90s.
I have owned probably a dozen of these hats over the years, and indeed, I wore one daily until about a year ago, when my last one finally disintegrated and I discovered that my alma mater no longer has a licensing relationship with The Game. I got my first ones for Christmas in 1993, after noticing them being worn by college football coaches. They'd been around for a little while before then, but not too much. 1993 is really the year zero of the phenomenon.
By 1997, the hats were so popular that they were mentioned in the "campus life" section of the US News and World Reports college rankings issue. In the 90s, they were sold everywhere. I bought the aforementioned first two in 1993 at a Finish Line in my local (non-college town) mall. By the time I was in school (98-02), they were less common generally, but still widely available at bookstores and stores that sold college stuff. After I graduated, I rarely saw them for sale anywhere except when I went back to campus. Starting around 2010, they even got scarce on campus.
T-shirts were never as widespread as the hats were. They were definitely available in the mid-90s, but mostly at bookstores, and even then, not featured as prominently. In my experience, knockoff (i.e., not made by The Game) t-shirts were more common than actual The Game shirts, in part because the design is so easy to copy. My experience may be biased, though, because I attended a very large, very athletics-focused college that had a lot of college t-shirt stores nearby, including street vendors who would just wander around carrying armfuls of shirts they printed themselves.
One of the most appealing features was the ease of customization. Even leaving aside ripoffs, The Game had (and maybe still has?) a program where you could submit a custom order. This is in part why they were so popular with Greeks: you could get a hat or shirt in a recognizable design unique to your local chapter. The Game also offered them in pretty much every college imaginable. It wasn't hard to find hats even for random tiny colleges in the middle of nowhere, for which you might not otherwise be able to find merchandise. I think some of the popularity was by default - for some small colleges, you might not have any other hat options.
As I mentioned, they were primarily popular among Greeks (*raises hand*) and the Greek-adjacent: preppy guys, upper-middle class even by the standards of college, probably wore Abercrombie and Fitch cargo shorts. The US News article I mentioned above suggested a correlation with lacrosse. I'm not sure if this was the case at the beginning of their popularity, but it was definitely true by my freshman year (98). My fraternity brothers made fun of me for being a frat-boy stereotype.
Although they were popular at a large number of schools, the prototypical school was somewhere like the University of Virginia: a large school with a fairly prominent athletic department whose student body consists mainly of the types of people listed above. There is definitely a connection to the southeastern US, but I suspect that's due more to the fact that guys in the southeast are frattier than guys in other parts of the country.
One important thing to note about the hats: They were almost always white, and they were almost never clean. It was kind of a badge of honor to have a grungy, brownish-yellow hat.
The Game made them for pro sports teams, too (I've seen some for all four major pro leagues), but those never caught on the same way. In part, this is because there was a lot more, often cooler merchandise for pro teams (think Starter, Apex One) at the time, but also because pro sports have an appeal beyond the preppy white guy base. The preppy white guys didn't want to wear overlap with the country bumpkins wearing Dallas Cowboys gear, or the black people wearing NBA stuff. Likewise, black people and country people weren't trying to look like preppy white kids at UVA. But they were a thing, and they were different in that instead of the three or four letters on the top line, they'd have a graphical logo, then the team name as usual on the second line.
COCKS was by far the most popular, to the point where you'd see almost as many COCKS hats on a given campus as you would hats for that school. The Game seems to have recognized this and appealed to the juvenile sensibility: My alma mater had WOODY (ostensibly in honor of our most famous football coach), the University of Dayton had GHETTO (the colloquial, semi-ironic term for their off-campus housing), and there was BUZZ for the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets.
The COCKS hat was such a cultural touchstone that, around 2006 or 2007, when ESPN's College Gameday broadcast from the University of South Carolina, I posted on a Livejournal college football community wondering why so few people in the crowd were wearing COCKS hats. There was a time where 20-30% of any white males in a photograph would be wearing a COCKS hat, but that Gameday was really the point at which I realized things had changed.
posted by kevinbelt at 2:14 PM on December 11, 2018 [4 favorites]
I have owned probably a dozen of these hats over the years, and indeed, I wore one daily until about a year ago, when my last one finally disintegrated and I discovered that my alma mater no longer has a licensing relationship with The Game. I got my first ones for Christmas in 1993, after noticing them being worn by college football coaches. They'd been around for a little while before then, but not too much. 1993 is really the year zero of the phenomenon.
By 1997, the hats were so popular that they were mentioned in the "campus life" section of the US News and World Reports college rankings issue. In the 90s, they were sold everywhere. I bought the aforementioned first two in 1993 at a Finish Line in my local (non-college town) mall. By the time I was in school (98-02), they were less common generally, but still widely available at bookstores and stores that sold college stuff. After I graduated, I rarely saw them for sale anywhere except when I went back to campus. Starting around 2010, they even got scarce on campus.
T-shirts were never as widespread as the hats were. They were definitely available in the mid-90s, but mostly at bookstores, and even then, not featured as prominently. In my experience, knockoff (i.e., not made by The Game) t-shirts were more common than actual The Game shirts, in part because the design is so easy to copy. My experience may be biased, though, because I attended a very large, very athletics-focused college that had a lot of college t-shirt stores nearby, including street vendors who would just wander around carrying armfuls of shirts they printed themselves.
One of the most appealing features was the ease of customization. Even leaving aside ripoffs, The Game had (and maybe still has?) a program where you could submit a custom order. This is in part why they were so popular with Greeks: you could get a hat or shirt in a recognizable design unique to your local chapter. The Game also offered them in pretty much every college imaginable. It wasn't hard to find hats even for random tiny colleges in the middle of nowhere, for which you might not otherwise be able to find merchandise. I think some of the popularity was by default - for some small colleges, you might not have any other hat options.
As I mentioned, they were primarily popular among Greeks (*raises hand*) and the Greek-adjacent: preppy guys, upper-middle class even by the standards of college, probably wore Abercrombie and Fitch cargo shorts. The US News article I mentioned above suggested a correlation with lacrosse. I'm not sure if this was the case at the beginning of their popularity, but it was definitely true by my freshman year (98). My fraternity brothers made fun of me for being a frat-boy stereotype.
Although they were popular at a large number of schools, the prototypical school was somewhere like the University of Virginia: a large school with a fairly prominent athletic department whose student body consists mainly of the types of people listed above. There is definitely a connection to the southeastern US, but I suspect that's due more to the fact that guys in the southeast are frattier than guys in other parts of the country.
One important thing to note about the hats: They were almost always white, and they were almost never clean. It was kind of a badge of honor to have a grungy, brownish-yellow hat.
The Game made them for pro sports teams, too (I've seen some for all four major pro leagues), but those never caught on the same way. In part, this is because there was a lot more, often cooler merchandise for pro teams (think Starter, Apex One) at the time, but also because pro sports have an appeal beyond the preppy white guy base. The preppy white guys didn't want to wear overlap with the country bumpkins wearing Dallas Cowboys gear, or the black people wearing NBA stuff. Likewise, black people and country people weren't trying to look like preppy white kids at UVA. But they were a thing, and they were different in that instead of the three or four letters on the top line, they'd have a graphical logo, then the team name as usual on the second line.
COCKS was by far the most popular, to the point where you'd see almost as many COCKS hats on a given campus as you would hats for that school. The Game seems to have recognized this and appealed to the juvenile sensibility: My alma mater had WOODY (ostensibly in honor of our most famous football coach), the University of Dayton had GHETTO (the colloquial, semi-ironic term for their off-campus housing), and there was BUZZ for the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets.
The COCKS hat was such a cultural touchstone that, around 2006 or 2007, when ESPN's College Gameday broadcast from the University of South Carolina, I posted on a Livejournal college football community wondering why so few people in the crowd were wearing COCKS hats. There was a time where 20-30% of any white males in a photograph would be wearing a COCKS hat, but that Gameday was really the point at which I realized things had changed.
posted by kevinbelt at 2:14 PM on December 11, 2018 [4 favorites]
Oh, one final thing. There was kind of a tradition in my high school of announcing where you'd decided to go to college by buying that college's hat from The Game and then wearing it to school. Although I'd been wearing the hats for various other schools for a few years by that time, that's actually why I bought my first hat from my alma mater.
posted by kevinbelt at 2:17 PM on December 11, 2018
posted by kevinbelt at 2:17 PM on December 11, 2018
This thread is closed to new comments.
"Mid to late 1990s of American campuses" is exactly the era in which these were popular on my campus. They were purchased from the campus bookstore, as the campus Greek store would obviously not have sold them.
posted by DarlingBri at 7:54 AM on December 11, 2018 [7 favorites]