Florida (Mickey Mouse)

I got this shirt like yesterday, with the laundry.

It was an extra shirt that my mom found. As the blog is running out of shirts I have been getting donations to keep it going for a few more weeks! -You'll be seeing a slew from Moke in a couple days.- Since it says Florida it must be from Walt Disney World or at least the Orlando resort area. With such a generic design you might think that it could be counterfeit, but it isn't; I did some research and it looks like the company that is on the bottom -Velva Sheen- did licencing for shirts back then. From it's age and "style" I can only assume that it's from the 80's or early 90's right? There's no way you could get this specific design anymore unless you got really lucky at a vintage store. Velva Sheen also did this exact same design but switched out the location for other places -West Virginia, Reno, California, etc.-

The quality of the fabric is fine, the color and stitching has held together well over all the years. The ink is another story: against the blue background the colors are still vibrant and stark but they have clearly faded, cracked and are pretty worn out overall. I don't mind a new bright shirt in my collection. And Mickey is so COOL that he's gone all the way from being outdated and retro that he's fissionable again, somewhat ironically -in an 80s guy kinda way-. 

Even when this shirt was new it was a lame tourist shirt. Maybe something that a parent would buy or a little kid trying to be cool. Or, the most confident, stylin' person ever, being so RAD that they can pull this off 101%. The design consists of Mickey Mouse in a yellow and white striped shirt with his red pants -no buttons but white stripes down the side- and a pair of sweet yellow rimmed, red lensed sunglasses. He's leaning up against a wall or in this case a vertical line with the word "FLORIDA" written in thin white text behind it. In very small words along the bottom -you can't see it in the pic- it says "©The Walt Disney Company by Velva Sheen". 

I just wore this today to use up a random shirt for the day. I wasn't really expecting much and had little to no planning involved. In hindsight, this would be kind of a fun shirt to wear to Disneyland or Downtown Disney to show off some "old school" Mickey gear -because you can't get it anymore, and that crowd might just appreciate it-. In general this is a safe shirt to wear anywhere that's okay with graphic tees, it's bright, family friendly, "totally rad" and sends all the right messages.

Today, on my first wear of this shirt, I had one comment that stood out. Other than me explaining to someone that I have no direction to go with for such an arbitrary shirt on my blog today. The comment I got was someone reading it aloud -which is super common of any shirt with big-ass text on it-. It was, "See! He's wearing a shirt that says Flo-Rida" Which I can only assume was a rap reference ¬_¬. I went on to reference the Family Guy quote, "Florida? That's the name of a state! Why is my name Florida?!" That's it, really stretching it for this one today...