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- A white Topman shirt with a photo of the Berlin Fernsehturm, which prodded someone in Greenwich Village to ask me where I’m from. In hindsight I wonder if it was a veiled question about race. This was 2012.
- A gray shirt from Bleach Catastrophe of a very faded monochrome photo of a winding staircase that somehow resembles a nautilus.
- A white shirt with a drawing of Google’s elongated search bar with two options as buttons: one says “Search”, the another “Destroy”.
- A gray shirt from David and Goliath that my wife told me she liked so much: it featured a disco ball with loud pink accents and darker grays in the background.
- An oversized crimson shirt from Heavy Rotation with 53 yellow chicks drawn on it, each of them individually drawn, strewn across the front of the shirt. One afternoon in college a friend dared ourselves to count the chicks, but somehow it gets confusing. Through the years it had discolored spots of bleach, effectively relegating it to a set of shirts I only wear when no one would see me.
- An extremely comfortable and faded cornflower blue shirt from David and Goliath that I bought in 2008 with a friend from high school, with an illustration of a washing machine-like contraption with attachments indicated with numbers, and in front were the words “I Got Hookups” in rounded font.
- A collared shirt from Topman with a pattern of tortilla yellow and black stripes that looked like a horrible optical illusion of a pedestrian crossing marking.
- A purple collared shirt I bought from Old Navy because I once wanted to own a stash of shirts that has every hue and color. The purple was unmistakably inspired by Barney the Dinosaur.
- A collared shirt with stripes that had earth colors: white, mud brown, moss green.
- A gray Abercrombie and Fitch shirt with thread-like stripes of white, in twos and threes, with handmade rips and stitches here and there to make it look macho?
- Another Bleach Catastrophe shirt, a faded brown-purple, that had the drawing of a face and plump lips stuffed with cotton embroidered on it.
- A faded black shirt from The Gap that features a big, foamy pint of beer, printed to look like it was from a ’70s poster. As far as I remember I lost it in a laundromat, and one day at the bus on my way to work I found someone crossing Junction wearing it.
- A black shirt that says “Manhattan”, with three letters in each row, so it was a block of text. It was the only shirt I bought from the MTV Store at Times Square in 2007.
- A white shirt from Out of Print with the print of Catcher in the Rye, with the horse and the orange-red background. It was at some point in my teenage life my favorite shirt.
- A red shirt from Urban Outfitters of The Strokes. I only wore it once and then lost it.