{"id":231900,"date":"2026-06-30T15:30:10","date_gmt":"2026-06-30T15:30:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/231900\/"},"modified":"2026-06-30T15:30:10","modified_gmt":"2026-06-30T15:30:10","slug":"meet-the-collector-with-3000-vintage-t-shirts-whos-keeping-phillys-past-alive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/231900\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet the collector with 3,000 vintage T-shirts who&#8217;s keeping Philly&#8217;s past alive"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>History isn&#8217;t just found in museums or books. For one Philadelphia man, he&#8217;s keeping the past alive through thousands of graphic T-shirts.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Everybody wears a T-shirt,&#8221; 41-year-old <a href=\"https:\/\/www.perryshall.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">Perry Shall<\/a> said.<\/p>\n<p>But not everybody has more than 3,000 vintage tees that are neatly stacked on countless shelves in what he calls his &#8220;T-shirt library&#8221; inside his East Germantown home.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Anything you can believe; they made a T-shirt out of,&#8221; Shall said while going through stacks of his shirts. &#8220;Kirstie Alley from Star Trek, a Listerine shirt, this is a scratch-and-sniff shirt. This actually still smells.&#8221;  <\/p>\n<p>Each one is over 20 years old. He uses a T-shirt folding board on a custom-built table to keep his collection organized.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I feel like I work at the GAP every time I do this,&#8221; Shall said. &#8220;They&#8217;re walking billboards. You&#8217;re expressing your feelings by walking down the street.&#8221;  <\/p>\n<p>About a thousand shirts are dedicated just to Philadelphia, including institutions, well-known icons and local food.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I got a CHOP shirt,&#8221; Shall said. &#8220;A Temple University shirt from the 1940s. A Joe Frazier shirt, a Teddy Pendergrass shirt. We have Rita&#8217;s Water Ice and Philadelphia, the big pretzel.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>      <img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/perry2.png#.png\" alt=\"perry2.png \" height=\"345\" width=\"620\" class=\" lazyload\"  loading=\"lazy\"\/><\/p>\n<p>                CBS News Philadelphia<\/p>\n<p>Shall&#8217;s collection is almost like a wearable scrapbook that started after finding his dad&#8217;s old T-shirts when he was just 10-years old growing up in northeast Philly. <\/p>\n<p>&#8220;All this stuff that kind of helped shape me musically, or locally or whatever, in T-shirt form,&#8221; Shall said.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>      <img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/perry3.png#.png\" alt=\"perry3.png \" height=\"348\" width=\"620\" class=\" lazyload\"  loading=\"lazy\"\/><\/p>\n<p>                Perry Shall<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s an endless amount of places that I get them,&#8221; Shall said. &#8220;I could go to thrift stores, flea markets, estate sales. I don&#8217;t pay a lot for these shirts. Some of these shirts sell for hundreds of dollars, some over $1,000 for one shirt.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s grown into even inspiring his work as a graphic designer, illustrator and Grammy-nominated art director. <\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve done art for everyone, from Green Day, Questlove, Skrilla, The Black Keys,&#8221; Shall said.<\/p>\n<p>His passion for vintage shirts has led to his own digital show called <a href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/t_time_shirtshow\/?hl=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">T-Time<\/a>, where he interviews others about their favorite T-shirts. One of his most memorable interviews was with comedian and actor <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=mXC1VkpbRNM&amp;t=29s\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">Gilbert Gottfried.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Sometimes the T-shirt tells you a lot more about a person than you expect,&#8221; Shall said. &#8220;Gilbert held on to everything he owned. So, he had every shirt from every show, every movie.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>And Shall is only getting started. He plans to continue collecting vintage T-shirts and sharing the history with others.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The ultimate goal is I want to create a Philadelphia archive, museum,&#8221; Shall said. &#8220;I want the whole museum to be a T-shirt museum. I want it to have the history of the T-shirt, it could talk about screen printing. The main idea is that I think there&#8217;s more of a history and interest behind these shirts that a lot of people really understand.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>\n          More from CBS News\n        <\/p>\n<p class=\"content__tags__label\">In:<\/p>\n<p>  <script async src=\"\/\/www.instagram.com\/embed.js\"><\/script><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"History isn&#8217;t just found in museums or books. For one Philadelphia man, he&#8217;s keeping the past alive through&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":231901,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[2327,28,69,71,70],"class_list":["post-231900","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-northeast-philadelphia","tag-pennsylvania","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231900","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231900"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231900\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/231901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}