6 min read . Updated: 03 Jan 2023, 07:05 PM IST 
PremiumInsider T-shirts and hats for long-ago films—including those that didn’t have merch to begin with—are never-hotter thanks to bootleg sites
It’s been 48 years since “Dog Day Afternoon" hit theaters. But as of last week, you could purchase a brand-new hat reprising the film’s all-caps poster, down to its memorable tagline: “Incredible But True!"
This hat is not officially licensed merch for Sidney Lumet’s twisty crime drama. It is an unsanctioned homage made by And After That, a teensy McAllen, Tx.-based clothing company that inventively—and often cheekily—pays homage to movies and bands with shirts, T-shirts and hoodies. Warner Bros. Discovery, the merchandising rights holder of “Dog Day Afternoon," did not comment.
And After That’s late December releases also included a hat based on Daft Punk’s 2001 track “Something About Us" with the band’s logo and a T-shirt with the title and cast of 2000’s “Dancer in the Dark" splayed across it.
Let’s call these what they are: bootlegs. (Edgar Gonzelaz, the founder of And After That also uses the term “re-creations.") But they are a bit savvier, a bit more artful, than a standard sidewalk-hawked knockoff. The company is like Canal Street crossbred with the Criterion Channel.
“I’m not someone that thinks I’m creating something new," said Mr. Gonzelaz, 27, who started the brand after being furloughed from his warehouse job during the pandemic and now runs it full time. “I’m just showing you what I love and hoping that you love it, too."
Legality is a concern. Douglas Hand, a lawyer at Hand Baldachin & Associates in New York, noted that if consumers are confused by the origin of this apparel (as in, if they believe it’s authentic, licensed merchandise) there could be a case to sue these brands.
Yet, because movie productions are a “very unorganized ownership structure," with many different producers, creatives and studio executives involved, “it makes it very difficult for whoever those owners are to actually police this," said Mr. Hand. Further, for older films the production companies are often defunct and people involved are deceased.
Brainier bootlegs of the AAT variety have surged in the past year. Slaughter Bootlegs makes madcap, text-dense T-shirts riffing on everything from “The X-Files" to “Animal House." The cinema-loving Instagram account Director Fits has sold T-shirts in homage to David Cronenberg’s unsettling “Videodrome" and Brian De Palma’s psychodrama “Body Double." T-shirt maker Mourning Glory has made a Cranberries shirt riffing on the band’s 1993 earworm “Linger."
Recent cultural properties seem just as ripe for re-creation as classics. Deathflip Designs and From the Void have run off bootleg shirts for David Fincher’s “The Social Network," and Wes Anderson’s twee oeuvre, respectively. Studios for the above films and television properties either did not provide comment on unauthorized merchandise or did not respond to a request for comment. Representatives for Daft Punk and the Cranberries did not respond to a request for comment.
There was a time when wearing a knockoff was considered déclassé or disingenuous. But, in recent years, a reappraisal has occurred: in some cases bootlegs are seen as cooler than originals. Credit Gucci partnering with Harlem’s original knockoff king Dapper Dan, or Virgil Abloh’s design ethos of taking an original object and minutely tweaking it to make something entirely new.
Also driving this re-creation rush? An exhaustion with the vintage market. Wearing a vintage T-shirt can be a shortcut to appearing erudite. It shows you obviously know who Big Audio Dynamite is, or that you can clearly quote from the “Alien" movies.
But the vintage T-shirt market has priced out the casual fan. That Big Audio Dynamite tee? You better have $350 for it now. “Alien?" As much as $250. At a certain point, you stop looking cultured and start looking like a mark. (Search “Kate Bush tee" on eBay and you’ll mostly find direct modern reproductions at about $18 a pop, much to the chagrin of vintage dealers who see their market getting upended by these fakes.)
A re-creation, said Connor Gunst, 28, a retail employee in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., is “more attainable" because they’re around $40 instead of the $300 for the vintage “American Psycho" shirt he was looking at. The lower individual price has allowed him to buy several And After That Tees for properties like “Raging Bull" and the Cannes Film Festival.
Many bootleggers are running off shirts and hats from entities that also didn’t have them to begin with. “They find movies and shows that don’t really have their own merch or… it’s impossible to find," said Matt Grippi, 33, who works in digital marketing for film and TV in Los Angeles.
“It kind of feels a little bit like a secret club," added Mr. Grippi, who has bought so much movie merch, his closet looks like it was brought to you by Martin Scorsese.
Indeed, there weren’t “Videodrome" shirts or “Dog Day Afternoon" hats released when those movies came out, so to create something novel around a beloved movie, neo-knockoffers often look deeper for inspiration—to favored scenes, or niche marketing ephemera. Hagop Kourounian, 25, the man behind Director Fits, noted that his “Body Double" shirt was based on a tiny booklet that the studio sent to theaters with instructions on how to advertise the film.
The esoteric nature of these sly reissues is key. For Mr. Grippi, wearing a hat based on, say, David Lynch’s cerebral classic “Twin Peaks" is preferable to wearing a hat from “whatever the most popular thing is."
Mr. Grippi notes with just a smidgen of shame that he was “the guy working at Blockbuster, who rolled his eyes at your selection." Once, you had to drive to your local movie store to encounter a snotty cinephile, but with the internet, music and movie nerds (a term Mr. Grippi doesn’t deny) have been able to congregate.
Today, Instagram is lousy with screenshots from Quentin Tarantino films, Sopranos memes and clips of Björk. The shirts are an echo of moodboard culture pulling together stills, titles and in-the-know easter eggs to prove that, yes, you too adore John Carpenter’s seminal 1982 horror movie “The Thing."
A bootleg shirt, “starts a conversation and gets your chance to talk about something that you really love and are interested in," said Sean Beauford, 35, who works in the art world in Pittsburgh. Mr. Beauford, who owns And After That tees for movies including “Phantom Thread" and “Punch-Drunk Love," noted that for people in his generation, wearing a shirt from an older movie is a way of experiencing the fandom in real time. He mostly missed the criticism and awards-show chatter when “Punch-Drunk Love" was in theaters 20 years ago, but by wearing the shirt, “it actually kind of brings the nostalgia to life."
A criticism of this merch (and those that wear it) is that it’s not very original—catering to homogenous Seinfeld-quoting-Scorsese-worshiping bros. Still, that cohort can be vast: many of Mr. Gonzelaz’s shirts, which he is proud to say are all screen-printed locally, sell out within days if not hours. Recently he is branching out with more “original" pieces that do not directly riff on movies or bands.
So far, Mr. Gonzelaz said no one has slapped him with a cease and desist for his gear. If they did he’d take it down.
Mr. Kourounian of Director Fits has had mixed results. When he re-created a USC Film School hat similar to one Steven Speilberg wore while making his movies, the college hit him with a cease and desist within five hours. He dutifully took the hats off his site.
On the other hand, in a twist out of Hollywood, film studios have recently noticed his reverent designs and asked Mr. Kourounian to make official shirts as giveaway promos for two recent indie movies: “Decision to Leave" and “White Noise." It’s a bootlegger’s big break.