PAGE 18 C I T Y P A P E R August 10, 2005

XXXXTHE SECRET HISTORY

BY GADI DECHTER

OVERSIZED WHITE T-SHIRTS DON’TGET A LOT OF LOVE THESE DAYS.A South Los Angeles high school banned themon campus last spring, believing theycontributed to brawls between black andLatino students. The Texas Youth Commissioncautions parents against buying or allowing

BILLY PARRINE (LEFT, 5XL) ANDNELSON JOHNSON (4-5XL)

CIARA PAYNE (5XL)

OSCAR WANE SMITH (6XL)

“NICK” (5XL)

August 10, 2005 C I T Y P A P E R PAGE 19

XXXLOF THE GALAXY TALL TEE

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ULI LOSKOT

children to wear them, warning they put kidsin “extreme danger” of street gangs. LastJanuary,a Maryland state’s attorney told NationalPublic Radio that the mere courtroom presenceof a dozen young men in matching white shirtsreduced a witness in a Baltimore murder trialto a violent shaking fit on the stand.

JUSTIN MYERS (6XL)

LESLIE MC MICKENS (2XL)

ROBERT WILSON (2XL)

WAISS BROWN (5XL) WITHMAHOGANI BROWN-GARRETT

PAGE 20 C I T Y P A P E R August 10, 2005

The fashion police are also cracking

down. “It has killed the business of urban

clothing,” says Pauli Singh, owner of the

His and Her’s chain of 12 casual-apparel

stores in the Baltimore-Washington area.

“Absolutely killed it. You can sell 50 of

them in a day, and you don’t make any

money.” Singh’s lament is echoed by in-

ner-city menswear retailers across the

East Coast, who decry the cheap schmatas

for sinking their business into a years-

long slump. Trend forecasters in news-

papers as mainstream as the Cleveland

Plain-Dealer and The Sun have declared

the T-shirt outré, passé, wack—“Start say-

ing your goodbyes now, menfolk,” wrote

Sun reporter Tanika White on July 11. “The

era of the T-shirt is dwindling.” An un-

scientific survey of young women at West

Baltimore’s Mondawmin Mall reveals

area ladies find young men in supersized,

extra-long tees look “sloppy” at best, and

“like girls” at worst.

Despite the haters—or because of them—

the gownlike shirt isn’t showing any sign

of joining the one-strapped overalls and

backward-pants in hip-hop heaven. On

125th Street in Harlem, where the predilec-

tion for huge white T-shirts probably took

root in the mid-1990s, stores like Dr. Jay’s

and Jimmy Jazz are still flooded with them,

hung on racks in clear plastic to keep them

immaculate. At the outdoor urban bazaar

that is 52nd Street in West Philadelphia,

fat three-packs of colossal tees are piled

atop peddlers’ folding tables, sold at cor-

ner bodegas, and vended out of illegally

parked cargo vans. And in Baltimore, where

the shirts are worn not only huge but also

hugely long, yards of white (and, in-

creasingly, black) cotton hang from young

black men from Pennsylvania Avenue to

Monument Street. They drape the knees

of white hoodrats in Hampden and Pigtown,

and billow like drag-racer parachutes be-

hind teenagers racing down Greenmount

Avenue on mini-motorcycles.

Rather than shrinking in popularity, the

oversized T-shirt appears to be getting

bigger. And longer.

Galaxy, the original and leading brand

of “tall tees”—so called for their extra-

long cut—has recently introduced a

7XL to its line of white and colored T-shirts

(its smallest size is 2XL). Mohammed

Shakir, manager of a web site that whole-

sales the competing SAAD brand of over-

sized tees, says he’s had to inflate his

output to 8XL (that is, XXXXXXXXL) shirts

in order to meet customer demand across

the United States and as far away as

the U.S. Virgin Islands.

“I don’t know what the hell is going on,”

Shakir says. “It’s crazy.”

To get a sense of just how colossal these

shirts are, consider the case of Sun Ming

Ming, the most recent Chinese NBA hope-

ful. At 7 feet 8 and three-quarters inches

tall, Sun is one of the tallest living men on

the planet. He wears a 6XL jersey. So does

the comparatively petite Houston Rockets

center Yao Ming, who is 7-foot-6.

In fairness, the Galaxy tees are sized a

bit smaller than regulation basketball uni-

forms. According to Baltimore suit mak-

er Victor Pascal, who recently examined

a 6XL Galaxy tall tee, it might properly fit

a man as short as 6-foot-11.

XXXXXXXL

“It has killed the business of urban fashion,” says Pauli Singh of the regional His and Her’s chain.“You can sell 50 of them in a day, andyou don’t make any money.”

August 10, 2005 C I T Y P A P E R PAGE 21

OF COURSE, TALL TEES AREN’TMARKETED

to the Legg Mason set for whom Pascal

makes custom business suits in his Light

Street store, or the overgrown. The typi-

cal tall tee wearer these days is young,

black, urban, and likely to be a hip-hop

head—although it has fans among others

who want to look “down” by dressing up.

“Hip-hop loves making as bold a state-

ment as it possibly can,” music journal-

ist Peter Shapiro says. “There’s the idea of

not only living large, but living extra-large,

and wearing a long shirt that goes down

to your knees is a bold statement. You’ll

get noticed.”

Shapiro speculates that the extra-long

look—and the general outsized ten-

dencies of hip-hop fashion—is born of

a combination of foppishness and cul-

tural economics.

“All pop-music forms have their ac-

companying style of dress, and there’s

been a strong strain of dandyism in them,”

Shapiro says. “African-American culture

in particular has always placed great em-

phasis on looking sharp.” In other words,

hip-hop fans tend to pay as much atten-

tion to their look as hip-hop artists, even

if they don’t have the kind of clothing bud-

get multiplatinum sales provide; in a cul-

ture obsessed with credibility, street wear

and stage wear are often interchange-

able. The glory of the oversized T-shirt,

then, may lie in its ability to satisfy con-

tradictory cultural injunctions: It’s both

cheap and extravagant, all-purpose and

outrageous—and economical enough to

afford the decadent gesture of wearing it

once and throwing it away.

“No one buys just one,” says Tykisha

Washington, a sales associate at the Mon-

dawmin Mall outlet of the Shoe City ap-

parel chain. “They come in and buy a

dozen,” she says of the young men who’ve

made the 5XL and 6XL Galaxy tall tee the

most popular items in the store.

“If you can go to the store and buy five

shirts for $25, that’s your whole week,”

explains Myorr Janha, vice president of

marketing at urban fashion house Phat

Farm, who predicts the style has a long

shelf life ahead of it. “With jeans and a

WHITE SALE: TALL TEES ONTHE RACK AT JIMMY JAZZ IN

MONDAWMIN MALL

PAGE 22 C I T Y P A P E R August 10, 2005

XXXXXXXL

URBAN CANVAS: (CLOCKWISE FROMTOP LEFT) CUSTOM PAINTED TALLTEES IN NEW YORK CITY; A MORETRADITIONAL USE OF THE TALL TEE ON SALE AT BALTIMORE’S

HOMETOWN GIRL BOUTIQUE; ANDTWO PHOTOGRAPHS OF A NEW YORK

CITY STREET SHRINE TO THE LATELINELL RAY PLAIR THAT

INCORPORATES A TALL TEE

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August 10, 2005 C I T Y P A P E R PAGE 23

Henry Abadi never set out to establish a fashion brand, much less

one that would become a mark of thug credibility.

pair of sneakers, you can’t go wrong in a

white tee.”

Shapiro and Janha both reject the more

sinister explanations that have dogged

hip-hop fashion trends since sagging pants

hit schoolyards in the mid-1980s: that they

mimic and glorify a violent prison culture,

where beltless cons stash contraband in

the folds of one-size-fits-all uniforms.

“Yes, it’s very easy to hide things under

baggy clothes,” Shapiro says. “Yes, you can

pack a lot of stuff under a long shirt. But I

don’t know that the style is explainable

simply as an expedient for hiding your

stash, hiding a gun, or shoplifting.”

Another oft-repeated nugget of con-

ventional wisdom has it that the white

shirt is a sort of inner-city camouflage.

“The culture of the customer is so every-

one will look the same,” says Stuart

Silberman, vice president of marketing at

Changes, a nine-store chain of urban

menswear stores based in Baltimore that

has been stocking tall tees since 2002. “If

the cops are looking for a suspect, [he’s in-

variably wearing a] long white T-shirt with

long shorts. So they can’t be identified.

That was the real reason it all started.”

That reasoning is double-edged, notes

Kareem “Geech” Lee, 28, a salesman at

Mitchell and Ness Nostalgia Co. in

Philadelphia, which makes the $350 vin-

tage sports jerseys, or “throwbacks,”

that have become popular urban wear.

“The reason why I stopped wearing white

tees,” Lee explains, “is because I was ar-

rested in 1999 for a crime I didn’t commit.

The [suspect] had on a white tee and jeans—

the same shit I had on—and he was dark-

skinned and short like me.”

The West Philadelphia resident says

he’s now careful to wear shirts with em-

blems on them. “In my neighborhood, we

all wear the same stuff, so me, I had to

change my dress code up,” he says, show-

ing off his oversized green Adidas T-shirt

and matching green sneakers. “I wear dif-

ferent things from everybody else, so now

when [the cops] run up on me, they don’t

get confused.”

Media confusion and laziness is partly

to blame for the white shirt getting a bad

rap, says Shawn “Ceez” Caesar of Unruly

Productions Inc., an urban-entertainment

marketing company based in Hanover. “If

kids start wearing purple hoodies,” Caesar

says, “then purple hoodies would be as-

sociated [by the media] with crime.”

However unfair, the association between

oversized white T-shirts and the criminally

inclined is by now well embedded in the

cultural firmament, as evinced by the 2004

praise poem “White Tee” by Atlanta gangs-

ta-rap outfit Dem Franchize Boyz. This

paean to the hard-core life begins, “I slang

in my white tee/ I bang in my white tee,”

and goes on to speculate that “Niggas in

the trap now/ I bet they got a white tee.”

“You want to see the uniform, eh?” smirks

a Wilmington, Del., police officer when

asked about oversized white tees on the

city’s streets. He directs a reporter to a

crime-ridden northeastern neighborhood,

where he says drug dealers have for sev-

eral years adopted the white tall tee as

their professional summer attire.

Likewise, on the Greenmount Avenue

shopping strip in Waverly, a man claim-

ing to be the proprietor of a nearby pawn

shop advises against photographing a

group of young men congregated in match-

ing tall tees in front of a neighborhood bar.

“You better not bring that camera ’round

here,” he says, rolling his eyes and laugh-

ing maniacally. “Them hoppers jump you

right quick.”

Those who do value the shirt for its thug-

life imprimatur—like the trio of tall-teed

preteen boys in Hampden who recently

declined to have their picture taken be-

cause they suspected that a female pho-

tographer with blond dreadlocks and an

Austrian accent was a “fucking fed”—

might be interested to know that their

manly threads are actually women’s sleep-

ing gowns.

HENRY ABADI NEVER SET OUT TO

establish a fashion brand, much less

o n e t h a t w o u l d b e c o m e a m a r k o f

thug credibility.

Born in 1947, in Aleppo, Syria, Abadi stud-

ied engineering but was unable to find

work because of state restrictions against

Jews. Neither could he legally leave the

country. In 1971, he determined to escape

and hired a smuggler to sneak him across

the Lebanese border.

Disguised in a djellabah, the traditional

Arab robe, and half-blind without his glass-

es, Abadi, his smuggler, and another des-

perate émigré boarded a bus filled with

Syrian soldiers en route to Lebanon for a

weekend furlough. “Of course it was dan-

gerous,” Abadi, now 58, says in the

Manhattan showroom of Harvic

International Ltd., which manufactures

the Galaxy brand of tall tees. “But when

you’re 24 you’re not afraid of anything.”

The escape went off, although Abadi’s

father was held for more than two weeks

in one of a network of underground pris-

ons run by Syrian secret police, until the

family was able to bribe his release. From

Lebanon, Abadi traveled south to Israel.

There he was able to find dangerous work

maintaining electrical towers, but loneli-

ness drew him after eight months to the

United States, where his older sister lived.

Like countless immigrants before him,

Abadi took the first job he was offered,

manning a table outside his brother-in-

law’s discount clothing store on Broadway

in Brooklyn, N.Y. It was Abadi’s first in-

troduction to African-American culture.

“At that time,” he says, speaking in a qui-

et, still-thick Syrian accent, “Broadway

was the Harlem of Brooklyn. The Afro was

the fashion. Even you would see white

women come and buy the Afro wig and

put it on.”

After a year of observing the discount

retail trade, Abadi decided to strike out

on his own. He borrowed money to open

his first shop, a children’s clothing store

named Princessa, on Avenue A at 14th

Street in Manhattan.

“It was a lousy area,” he says of the now-

gentrified Alphabet City neighborhood

east of the East Village. “A forbidden area.

Even the police wouldn’t dare go inside.”

The business struggled. When his lease

expired in 1977, Abadi moved to Jamaica,

Queens, where he tried his hand at sell-

ing children’s clothing and linens to the

mothers in the predominantly poor, black

neighborhood. This outing was even less

successful than Princessa, so Abadi re-

paired back to Manhattan, this time to

another struggling neighborhood, Spanish

Harlem. In tune with the priorities of

his poor and working-class customers, he

called his new store Saverama.

“I remember the day we opened,” he

says, with obvious pride. “June 18, 1978.”

Abadi still owns Saverama, which sells

discount clothes for the whole family.

In a fitting bookend to Abadi’s retail ad-

PAGE 24 C I T Y P A P E R August 10, 2005

ventures, it’s currently managed by an-

other brother-in-law.

Having finally produced a profitable en-

terprise, Abadi determined to leverage

his retail expertise into a wholesale ven-

ture less exposed to the vagaries of loca-

tion. In 1983, he teamed up with a partner

to form Harvic International. Their first

imports were cheap sneakers from Taiwan

that came emblazoned with the name

Galaxy, which they sold to “off-price”

mom-and-pop clothing chains and low-

end department stores. Soon after, Harvic

began importing commodity-clothing

items like boxer shorts and swimming

trunks and had them emblazoned with

the Galaxy name, for which Harvic had

registered a trademark.

Business was good, but hardly boom-

ing. In 1985, on a tip from a department-

store buyer friend, Abadi ordered from

Chinese suppliers his first batch of ex-

tra-long, oversized T-shirts. Known in

the industry as 40-inch shirts—to dis-

tinguish them from the conventional 33-

inch length made by underwear brands

such as Hanes and Fruit of the Loom—

the huge tees were becoming popular as

“dorm shirts” for girls.

“I used to bring the blanks and they

would print on them to sell to chain stores,”

Abadi says. “They used to print on it a lot

of beautiful things”—cartoon characters

and flowers.

Abadi removes a 6XL Galaxy tee from a

hanger in the showroom and spreads it

out on a conference table, to explain its

success as a sleeping shirt. “All our T-shirts

are tubular, you see?” he says. “No seam,

which makes it easy to print on.” The shirts

also have a tight neck, relative to their

size, and are made of heavier cotton—be-

tween 170 and 180 grams per square me-

ter—than a typical undershirt. These same

characteristics would one day be prized

by an entirely different customer base.

DURING MUCH OF THE 1990S—SALADdays, apparently, for the dorm shirt—

Harvic imported about 500,000 of them

a year. On the strength of that one item,

the company was able to branch out into

entire lines of discount clothing, includ-

ing the Chinese-made school uniforms

and inexpensive men’s business wear it

still wholesales nationwide under the

generic names Authentic School Uniform,

Modern Classic, Enrico Bertucci, and

Clarenzo Muzzi, among others.

By 2000, however, the dorm-shirt mar-

ket had fizzled, and Abadi had stopped

importing them. He had only a few hun-

dred of them left in his Brooklyn ware-

house when he received an unusual order

for the item—from a menswear retailer

in inner-city Newark, N.J., who wanted

1,000 pieces.

On the promise of that small order, Abadi

says, he immediately placed a call to his

Chinese supplier and ordered them to

“What do I know why they want it long,” Clinton Men’s Shop’s Joseph Steiner says. “I only wish my beytzim were so long.”

XXXXXXXL

RAG TRADE: CLINTON MEN’S SHOPSALESMAN “BIG NOID” (LEFT) WITHTHE GARMENT THAT THE NEWARK,

N.J., STORE HELPED MAKE POPULAR, WITH OWNER JOSEPH

STEINER (RIGHT).

August 10, 2005 C I T Y P A P E R PAGE 25

manufacture 60,000-dozen more.

“He said he was a very good barometer,”

Abadi says of Clinton Men’s Shop owner

Joseph Steiner, who placed that first order.

“Because he sells strictly hip-hop or what-

ever we call it. Street wear.”

Steiner told Abadi that young black men

in Newark were suddenly asking for their

white T-shirts long, very long.

Abadi took a chance on Steiner’s ear-to-

the-street, and the gamble paid off. “All of

a sudden, I start getting calls,” he says.

“Young black men, hustlers or peddlers in

Harlem, they start to call on me, because

they’ve seen the shirt somewhere. I start

getting calls from everywhere, from Georgia.

This is 2000, 2001.”

For a guy who reportedly touted himself

as a bellwether in hip-hop trends, Joseph

Steiner neither looks nor acts the part. The

elderly Hungarian immigrant has been

running Clinton Men’s Shop for almost 35

years in a run-down section of Newark

that appears, by the number of hand-paint-

ed advertisements lining Clinton Street,

to specialize in car-window tinting.

“What do I know why they want it long?”

Steiner says, waving a weary hand at

the few customers browsing the 5,000-

square-foot store, which is crammed floor

to ceiling with shirts, jeans, and sneakers.

“It’s a fashion for these youngsters.” Steiner

turns to his son, who’s manning the cash

register. “Why they like the T-shirt long?”

“I have no clue,” mumbles Steve Steiner,

29. “They want it, so we get it.”

Joseph Steiner shrugs. “There’s your an-

swer. I only wish my beytzim were so

long,” he sighs, using the Yiddish word

for testicles.

Steiner discounts his role in establish-

ing Galaxy as the tall-tee brand of choice.

It’s Henry Abadi who’s the genius, he says,

jokingly referring to the Harvic chief as a

“big gonif,” or thief. “But don’t tell him I

said so,” Steiner quickly adds. “He’s a good

man. And a hell of a businessman.” He taps

the side of his head. “Very shrewd.”

Back in New York, Abadi was having a

hard time persuading his sales staff that

their signature women’s nightshirt was

an emerging hit with the hypermasculine

urban-wear crowd. “My boys didn’t want

to promote it,” he says, so he took 20-year-

old salesman Eli Cohen to a public school

at 33rd Street and Third Avenue.

“I said, ‘Eli, you see these black guys, you

see these young students? They’re all wear-

ing Galaxy,” Abadi recalls. “Eli said, ‘Oh,

come on, get out of here.’” So the older man

beckoned to one of the kids on the play-

ground. “I said to him, ‘Tell me, my man,

tell me what you’re wearing.’” Abadi smiles

at the memory. “The kid says, ‘Galaxy. Only

the best.’”

Now Harvic’s chief salesman, Cohen,

25, smirks when he hears about other

doubters, such as Baltimore’s Downtown

Locker Room chain, which has decided

against manufacturing its oversized Luxe-

T shirt in a 40-inch version. “They’re miss-

ing out on sales,” he sniffs. “Everybody’s

ordering it, and reordering it, so it’s ob-

viously selling.”

Abadi won’t disclose Harvic’s sales fig-

ures, though in an early phone conversa-

tion Cohen put the annual number of white

Galaxy tall-tee sales at 3 million. Abadi

says it’s between 1 million and 2 million,

but won’t get more specific. The company

employs 28 people in its Manhattan head-

quarters and Brooklyn warehouse.

In addition to the Galaxy tall tees, which

are now made in 20 colors, Harvic has ex-

panded the Galaxy line to include the full

complement of casual urban men’s pieces,

including down jackets, square-backed

camouflage tank tops, oversized solid-col-

or polos, and striped button-down shirts.

But the tall tee’s status as king of the line

is clearly felt. A glass case on the Harvic

showroom table displays magazine clip-

pings picturing athletes and rap icons such

as Sean “P Diddy” Combs rocking the tall

tee, and a 2003 New York Times story about

its use as a canvas for custom airbrush de-

signs by graffiti artists.

Lately, the dorm shirt turned man-shirt

has spawned another gender-bending

fashion transformation.

“It has driven the shorts to be longer,

too,” says Andy Goetz, president of the

Changes store chain. “So now we sell capris

to men, because they need to have their

shorts visible below the shirt. Otherwise

it looks like a dress.”

Galaxy has recently come out with cam-

ouflage-print capri pants for men. ★

READY TO WEAR: TALL TEES ON SALEAT THE CLINTON MEN’S SHOP