Monday, April 06, 2009

Every Shirt VIII: Emperor

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shirt: Emperor - Wrath of the Tyrant/"Priestess"
size: unknown (US), either XL or 2XL
vintage: 1999/2000
provenance: retail

This shirt is based on the reissue cover art for Wrath of the Tyrant, which sets a definite lower bound on when I could have picked it up. I didn't have it in the summer of '99 where my inexperience with Euro date formats led me to miss their last real US tour (with Borknagar, which was a real kick in the guts since they've never been back at all since), but I did have it by the summer of 2000, when I wore it to see Iron Maiden on their Brave New World tour. This makes it also about the last metal shirt that I bought at retail; nearly everything else since has been from catalogs or from bands directly.

As expected for a nearly ten-year-old shirt that has seen service on several continents, this one has been worn hard, and the identifying tag no longer exists. This is still an extraordinarily large-cut shirt, even if it was originally 2X rather than XL. This is made more odd by the fact that Emperor do not generally have, er, large, fans here in the States -- maybe back then, the destroyed tag obscuring the evidence, their merch was being handled by the same people who did Cradle's shirts. Seriously, this is big on me, and that's saying something.

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