The roughly mid-90's and earlier (generally pre-Toonami, pre-anime boom) era of anime & manga fandom: early cons, clubs, tape trading, Nth Generation VHS fansubs, old magazines & fanzines, fandubs, ancient merchandise, rec.arts.anime, and more!
A lot of cons do/did a new shirt every year, but pictures of old con shirts only seem to show up online when someone loses a bunch of weight or gains a bunch of weight and tries to sell their old shirt on EBay.
Is there anywhere trying to archive/categorize old con shirts (front/back/tag photos, etc)? Also, when did con shirts become a thing? Were they always a thing? Did people make shirts for anime rooms at larger cons and similar pop-up events (movie-screenings, etc.) or did it not make sense to do unless there was a full-blown convention? I guess it would have depended on how friendly the local screen-printer was regarding small orders.
Anyone have any photos?
mbanu: What's between Old School and New School?
runesaint: Hmmm. "Middle School", perhaps?
Convention T-shirts have been a thing for about as long as I can remember for multi-day types of events. And not just anime conventions, or even sci-fi conventions - I remember a few of my coworkers or bosses that would have shirts from tech shows and conferences from the 90s (I've had a few myself but those are of a much more recent vintage). I'm curious as well whether the 90s were a tipping point for this phenomenon or if it started much earlier.
I remember seeing Anime Weekend Atlanta shirts back as far as 4 (1998) or 5 (1999) but I am pretty sure I didn't buy my first one until AWA 6 in 2000. I have a stack of AWA shirts I bought over the years; they're packed away until I can figure out what I want to to with them to make a display collage out of them. I might have a shirt or two from some different anime conventions but I can't recall off hand.
No idea if anyone is actively archiving these things either.
I've got nearly a decade of Animazement T Shirts from mid 2000's to 2019 (the last time I was there). Those are in a box in storage and not sure what to do with them. I did win one award at the Anime North AMV contest this year and they sent me a shirt as a gift along with my plaque, so that shirt is hanging up in my closet atm that ill probably wear at AWA coming up.
I don't know when convention t-shirts became a thing, but t-shirts in general as something adults would wear in public (instead of a collared shirt) became a thing in the 1960s along with the relaxation of fashion "rules" in general. The comic conventions I attended in the 1980s definitely sold t-shirts (and pins, jackets, etc) - the AFF made good use of their Jim Steranko-designed logo everywhere they could. I staffed the AFF but I don't believe I ever got a staff shirt. Dragoncon handed out staff shirts to pretty much everybody. People were asking about t-shirts even before the first AWA, but it was AWA 3 before we had shirts for sale; the first shirt featured anime character clip-art I assembled, but subsequent shirts from AWA 4 onwards have featured original artwork. I know both AWA and Anime North have different shirts for staff and attendees but I don't know if other conventions follow suit.
I probably have eight or so AWA shirts, probably that many Anime North shirts, and a hodge podge of shirts from other shows like Anime Central, etc, all in varying degrees of wear and tear.