Common Thread: Vintage MX Tees Unraveled
Rarer than hen’s teeth. As delicate as mom’s fine china. Listed on eBay for more than your most recent electric bill.
At this point, well-kept motorcycle event t-shirts from the 1970s through the ‘90s have been worn thin on the ground. Some were donned regularly over the decades and reduced to shreds before being relegated to shop rag and finally getting binned. Others were saved for special occasions, then crisply folded and put away until next year’s big event. This either/or scenario is exemplary of motorcycle racing’s common thread, woven from grit to glamour: tough people straddling dangerous machines would do battle only after donning logo-soaked and rainbow-blasted gear. In solidarity, fans bought into that brash flash with equally loud event t-shirts loaded with glory days branding from long-gone stadiums and sponsors that time has nearly forgotten.
These shirts were simple things in their time and a means of “proclaiming one’s loyalty to a particular brand of machine,” as Maico historian David Russell wrote in his own treatise on tees. These items now exist as important cultural throwbacks that can still stop onlookers in their tracks: “Hey – cool shirt. What year’s that from?” Well, I’m glad you asked.
Rub Some Dirt On It
There was arguably no larger player in the event apparel arena than Dirt Shirts International, which operated for some three-plus decades out of Florida beginning in the 1970s. Early promotional material from 1978, with Charles Adams listed as president, touts the company and their “highly detailed sport action designs.” The “skilled art department” was “fast, reliable and courteous” utilizing “special coloration techniques” when their direct-screen prints, and “not transfers,” were affixed to fabric.
Former Florida print shop employees recalled in a 2025 podcast working at another contemporary company where they “pumped out a lot of volume.” To put product runs into perspective, their conversation noted some 10,000 NASA-branded t-shirts, with an eye-catching six-color design to boot, for John Glenn’s 1998 space flight out of Kennedy Space Center when the Mercury-era astronaut was 77 years old. “They did all the space/NASA shirts. They did a lot of dirt bike/rally shirts. They were real popular; they had the automatic presses and the big dog stuff,” one former employee, whose mother worked at Dirt Shirts, said.
Dirt Shirts’ former “Space Coast” headquarters in Titusville, Florida was a stone’s throw shy of the Kennedy Space Center, which made the bleed over from motorcycles into shuttle launch and airshow garments a good fit. The company’s roots in the sandy soil of the Sunshine State were on display again when they produced a strong-selling charity benefit shirt in response to massive wildfires in central Florida that forced the postponement of a July 4th race at Daytona International Speedway – which Dirt Shirts had naturally also produced a run of tees for. “It’s a gesture of appreciation for true heroes,” Adams told the Orlando Sentinel in 1998. By the early 2000s, the company had re-branded itself as “Designs Alive USA,” which was highlighted in an article on an aerospace trade show.
In a vein similar to the Florida wildfire fundraiser tee, Dirt Shirts was credited with the design for a commemorative shirt sold to support American riders as they sought to compete in the 1991 Motocross des Nations in Holland. As the advertisement on page 28 of the September 1991 edition of Dirt Bike magazine notes, “only avid motocross fans should apply,” with their $14 being sent to the then-AMA headquarters in Westerville, Ohio. Dale Freitas, long-time trail boss for the Meteor Motorcycle Club, worked with Dirt Shirts in the mid-1980s to produce the first-ever event tee for the club’s long-running Sandy Lane Enduro. He recalled their art department as being “super easy to deal with. All you had to do was give them some ideas and they would develop a concept. They were very easy to work with and very reasonably priced.” At larger national motocross races, such as those at Maryland’s Budds Creek or Southwick in Massachusetts, he added that Dirt Shirts booths with designs for that very day’s race were regularly up for grabs.
Worn and Torn
Rich Dombey, who for the past 16 years has done all the design and merchandising work for the Legends and Heroes of Motocross tour, was a “budding artist” in 1979 when he launched a custom vehicle lettering and signage design company. As a gear head and race fan, he “couldn’t get enough” of what Dirt Shirts was doing throughout the 1980s and borrowed some bits of their “second-to-none” layout, lettering and compositions when doing work for his own company. “I was turning out all this amazing work thanks to the inspiration that I was feeding off of,” he said of that finest form of flattery.
Dombey, in a maybe-meet-your-heroes encounter, would eventually be introduced to Adams, the former Dirt Shirts president. The encounter at a Unadilla national motocross race was thanks to a marketing chief from New Jersey’s Raceway Park – former home of NHRA Summernationals drag racing and also a great place to see Dombey’s decades of logo, lettering and signage handiwork. “We became somewhat of friends,” Dombey said of Adams. “I learned a lot just from having a conversation with him and how they produced their designs.” He noted that “not many realize that all their art was hand-drawn” and the color separations for each of the inks were hand-cut by Dirt Shirts employees from Rubylith, a type of two-layer transparent masking material. “Each shirt must have had 50 to 60 hours in each design.”
Dombey purchased some 300 original Dirt Shirts tees over the years and has stored them away in plastic container bins. “Some are still in the original bags. When you open the lid of the bin, the smell of silk screen ink just fills the room.” Many moons ago while vacationing in Florida, he stopped by the old business address in hopes of checking in with his old friend and source of artistic inspiration. A CLOSED sign met him at the door; Dombey was “absolutely crushed” to have missed the connection. At present, he’s cataloging his personal collection for a spiral-bound book that will display the front and back prints adorning his hundreds of Dirt Shirts tees.
Looking Forward, Throwing Back
All that said, Dirt Shirts was hardly the only outlet producing vivid tops for exciting events. Not wanting to leave money on the table, other credits include offerings from capitalization-prone AXO, XTREME, JT USA and TURN One among others. In a 2021 PulpMX.com retrospective on 1980s and ‘90s gear lines, author Tony Blazier wrote that the masculine majority of motocrossers generally “have no problem showing up to the track in a set of skin-tight Day-Glo pink pants.” Race day fashion, which would look “completely absurd in nearly any setting other than a motocross track,” Blazier wrote, “is just weird like that.”
Current-day companies like Dirt Studios and White Knuckle Motorsports have stepped up to fill the flashy neon void; they’ve captured this loud visual interpretation of very specific points in time and place to a tee (pardon the pun). Offerings from either brand incorporate many of the big block and sharp shape-heavy Mondrian and Memphis design elements seen on popular prints from the 1980s and ’90s. This accuracy continues right on through to the emulation of early 2000s Frutiger Aero and Y2K-inspired arrangements, with swirling and swooping letters conveying tech-inspired playful possibilities. But what separates quality new stock, with a boxy fit and beefy high-rise collars, from the old and rare time capsule – and is it worth getting all torn up over? For those who appreciate prized pieces of preservation, nothing but true vintage will do… and that’s where the common thread guides us next.
Rags and Riches
Sean Magee, who runs the Odd Folk vintage apparel storefront in New Jersey with partner Rachael Smith, is also an avid motorcyclist. For the shop to truly provide vintage clothes, his self-imposed cut-off is 2001, at the 25-year mark. “They aren’t making any more of this shit,” he joked of the durable denim jackets, Screen Stars-tagged tees and camo trucker caps. The Daytona Beach native’s first motorcycle simply “had to be a Harley” and a 1980 H-D Shovelhead helped to fulfill the personal prophecy. Still, Magee is a multi-disciplined rider with experience with everything from BMX racing to off-road trail rides and the aforementioned H-D street touring. “Riding bikes the way that I did for so long, and just trashing clothes and not having a ton of money, I gravitated toward vintage,” he said, and it was there and then that he started to realize that older apparel simply lasted longer than their contemporary counterparts. “It’s the way cotton was grown and milled. It’s the textiles themselves,” he said. “Shirts now that start soft are just ‘done.’ It’s like we’ve manufactured out the ‘wear.’ I want to be able to wear something new and wear it in myself,” he said of brand-new items where the production process has been optimized to such a fine point that we have essentially traded earned longevity for immediate comfort.
A good enough graphic hung on the official merchandise rack inside the venue – and the herd of crappy counterparts slung on the street by scalpers next to the stadium – serves as a decent souvenir. Maybe that’s all these items were ever meant to be? A token to say “I was there,” until that memory doesn’t matter anymore? It’s right at this moment, when the original owner is ready to donate the top to the local thrift store, that inherited nostalgia comes full-circle as someone younger can’t take ownership of these common threads fast enough. Just as millennium-era gear has come back around to have its day, the latest crop of shirts will certainly see their own era of scarcity and desirability. Thing is, these direct-to-garment prints or heat transfers seem to so rarely measure up to a good old single stitch, Skimmers tag, 50/50 cotton and polyester blend tee, which online vintage tee authority Defunkd notes as the 1980s norm. But why? “Looking at vintage moto shirts makes you realize how dull everything is now. The amount of time and effort that were put into vintage moto designs will never be replicated. Each piece was real, hand-drawn, and entirely unique,” as one online commentator / collector offered for this piece. His disdain for modern-day shirts, “from the designs down to the quality of the shirts they are printed on,” was barely masked. This is why some of us will pay many pretty pennies for a well-kept example of a shirt with a date on the back from a heyday we weren’t even old enough to experience.
A Stitch in Time
As another dirt bike shirt collector and graphic designer shared, the artists who “used to hand-draw each design have been replaced with computer-based graphic designers and that ‘old school’ look is just hard to replicate digitally. Not impossible, but it takes a really talented artist to get that same look,” he said, adding that the price of doing this right adds up fast with decent shirt blanks, screen printing chops, shipping and all the other ancillary details of running a cottage industry out of the local boutique. Personally, my path began with an interest in old band shirts – something sold on tour at the merch booth by bands long since broken up. It eventually grew to include vintage motorcycle shirts that would occasionally pop up on eBay for comparatively less eye-popping prices. Like anything else sub-culture-related, this anorak behavior is all a matter of mundane taste not worth boring strangers with, until striking up that unexpected conversation:
“Wow – cool shirt. What year’s that from?” Well, since you asked, it’s Unadilla ‘82, Laguna Seca ‘89, or Daytona ‘87. You’re right, I wasn’t at that race. But I wish I had been – and that’s the real common thread running through these old rags as it joins generational seams.
To read more about the relationship between fashion and motorcycling, explore here.
The Current: Seeing the Light
Seeing the Light: Vintage Motorcycling on Electric’s Horizon
The steady drone of summer rain on the Sprinter van roof was not soothing. An hour earlier, race officials at Mid-Ohio had called us off the starting line as an approaching storm suddenly cascaded into a thunderous downpour. The longer this weather went on, the less likely we were to get back on-track. So I laid on the van floor... and waited.
Conditions did finally clear and it was soon time to re-light the fire inside of the 1974 Maico 250 GP. Unbeknownst until that moment, water ingress behind the flywheel cover – despite generous blobs of silicone sealant – was causing electrical cut-outs at high RPMs. No amount of quick-thinking fixes were making matters better as the minutes until my second moto ticked away. The gate dropped into deep mud while I was still fiddling in the pits and just like that, in a disappointing decrescendo, my race day was over before it even began.
‘It’s Just Nuts and Bolts’
I was not around for Maico’s short-travel glory days atop natural terrain motocross tracks. I was just a kid watching from the sidelines when those same motorcycles turned 20 years old and were competing in vintage events. When it was my turn to try riding a dozen years later, it seemed important to first grasp the basics of mechanical functionality. That’s because just getting these things up the driveway under their own power was often left to a coin flip. “It’s just nuts and bolts,” one former Maico racer and European car mechanic offered as he tried to assuage my mechanical hesitancy. Yeah, easy for him to say.
Different Strokes
Twenty years ago, my elders bent an olive branch off the shade tree: shadow them now, or pay somebody else later. Over timing belts and under jacked-up hand-me-down cars, the question that reverberated in my head was this: “Could I have done the job on my own?” When the answer was “no chance” with a gallows humor laugh at the sheer thought of it, the titular twilight in my book became two-fold: an aging-out population of motorcyclists hailing from the 1970s “bike boom” glory days and the impending replacement of their snarling two-strokes with snappy cordless power drills on wheels.
The thing is, electric vehicles break, too. Social media groups dedicated to the Vargs and Storm Bees of the world are loaded with many familiar troubleshooting questions. The difference here is that the power plant is so far removed from a cam chain that ate the insides of the motor or an out-of-round bore skillfully measured in increments thinner than a strand of human hair. The stakes are high; the stress of repair higher yet. Where can the collective go from here?
- “I never liked working on motorcycles. I fix my own car and can spend days at a time working on an airplane, but with motorcycles I just want it to turn on and off without having to think about it.”
- “My Zero shares the garage with a Triumph Scrambler 900, and I love them both, but honestly, only the Zero gets ridden these days as it’s just so much more practical. But living a life with a sense of nostalgia and purpose is good for the soul. Shifting gears, listening to vinyl, manual espresso coffee; there is still something noble and almost romantic about doing things the hard way.”
- “I bought an EV to commute to work on – a job it’s great at. The lack of maintenance is good, as it lets me spend time on my other bikes that need more time spent on them.”
- “Haven’t needed gas in nearly 10 years, will not be going back until I inherit my dad’s motorcycle, and then that will likely sit for a very long time.”
A Deal with the Gods
Electric two-wheel proliferation isn’t a prediction – it’s already plain to see. City and suburban streets across the U.S. are loaded with “micro-mobility” devices that are showing people – some of them quite young and early on in their riding careers – what the wind in their ears sounds like at 20mph. If just enough of these curious onlookers consider objectively “cooler” full-size EV bikes, there’s a chance to spark the second “bike boom” in the same vein as the early 1970s market explosion. Hell, even the vintage races I attend are now dotted with Talarias and Surrons (with the latter selling some 120,000 units globally between 2017 and 2023, per Motocross Action Magazine) as pit bike transportation.
This is the critical moment of plurality that U.S. motorcycling hasn’t seen in 50 years. Those UJMs and primitive road-going dual-sports of yesteryear – part of the three million motorcycles registered in the U.S. in 1972, up from 500,000 in 1957 – have been replaced by cheap electric hacks that’ll help claw back some of the ground lost long ago. The end result is the same: surging numbers of people on two wheels who are learning to enjoy the basic facts around the acts of riding, repairing, racing and repeating. In the end, vintage and everything the sector celebrates is a “moving target.” The definition adjusts depending on your age, the executive director of America’s largest vintage racing league told me earlier this year, but it isn’t going away.
True, you could just buy something new and skip the either/or catastrophic comparison I just blew 1,500 words on. Still, the benefits of a running start from the bottom of the hill are such that you’ll learn so much more on the way to reaping the rewards at the top. Just don’t ask Sisyphus about this same struggle, though. He’s still a bit jaded from all those huffing-and-puffing pop starts up the driveway.