Via Boingboing.com:
Star Wars fans express their love for the franchise in numerous ways, including by dressing in themed apparel and accessories. From T-shirts to leggings, there are a lot of options out there for fans to wear to show their passion. Since A New Hope was released in 1977 fans have been expressing their fandom in this way, though the items offered back then were a bit different from the variety available today. These early pieces of Star Wars clothing have not been forgotten however, but instead live on in the collections of Star Wars collectors who seek out these vintage items.
Gus Lopez has been collecting since 1977 when he started buying Star Wars products as a kid. He saved everything from then and began seriously collecting in the early ’90s. In 1994 he created The Star Wars Collectors Archive, which features items from Star Wars collections around the world. According to Lopez, vintage apparel is not a common area of Star Wars collecting though people will specialize in areas of it. In Lopez’s collection for example, a lot of his vintage apparel consists of cast and crew items. These are jackets, caps, and other pieces that were made for those who worked on the films.
“It’s a bit more esoteric area of collecting. A lot are after the posters, action figures, coins, and the very major visible things. Apparel items are not the mainstream in collecting, but some people go after pockets of it like shoes, Underoos, or T-shirts so some people do that and there are a reasonable number of collectors of cast and crew items,” Lopez told Boing Boing.
Considering the sheer amount of apparel that has been produced since A New Hope, it makes sense why some collectors might choose to specialize in an area within Star Wars apparel rather than aim to collect every piece. The Star Wars Collectors Archive has listed around 2,667 apparel items, 509 pieces of jewelry, and 581 cast and crew items. Within the apparel section there are over 1,000 shirts alone included with the majority comprising of T-shirts.
In addition to certain collectors specializing in an area of Star Wars apparel, some will go after items displaying a specific character according to collector Duncan Jenkins. Jenkins also began collecting after seeing the original Star Wars and some of his first items were T-shirts with Star Wars iron-ons. He has co-authored books on the subject with Lopez such as Gus and Duncan’s Comprehensive Guide to Star Wars Collectibles and serves on the board of directors for Rancho Obi-Wan, a museum which houses the world’s largest Star Wars memorabilia collection. Jenkins has found that few focus solely on collecting just vintage apparel.
“I would say that a lot of people who are character focused collectors will seek out the items that apply to that character across all the ranges and that will include the apparel so if they really like Wicket then they’ll go after the Wicket T-shirts and different pieces of apparel that have come with Wicket on them,” Jenkins said. “But as far as somebody who’s just exclusively vintage apparel collecting that’s very, very rare.”
Vintage apparel includes many different types of items, but it still differs from the variety found by fans now.
“Today you can get pretty much any kind of clothing that you would like, particularly for adults and women and girls. It was almost exclusively just boys clothing at the beginning. The exceptions to that would be things like the cast and crew items that the people who worked on the films had. Those were obviously done in adult sizes and a few other little things like the infamous Underoos were available for both boys and girls, but now they’ve done those in adult sizes as well this year so that’s kind of fun,” Jenkins told Boing Boing.
Click below to read the full article.
