How To Not Wear A Shirt

Back when I fist became interested in Babymetal, merch pretty was hard to come by...mostly due to my inexperience with the Japanese e-commerce system. Navigating the Amuse/Tenso process would have been overwhelmingly disorienting, if I had even known about it - which I did not. With no English-language outlets such as we have today (such as mflstores.com, Hot Topic, GoMerch, etc.), the only place to turn was eBay. After a few days of searching out merch, it had become apparent that it would not come cheap.

The first shirt I ever got was the Red Moon T-shirt, sold only at the Makuhari Messe show on December 21, 2013. Cost me about 80 bucks American, because this was in March of 2014, just at the very beginning of the huge expansion in the fan base due to the 'Gimme Chokko' video; nowadays it will easily sell for more than twice that amount. That was a good time to be getting into the Babymetal game. (But remember: BABYMETAL IS NOT A FUCKING GAME!!!)

So of course I ended up ordering more - a lot more. Each time I received one of these authentic T-shirts, it was such an amazing and euphoric experience. I cherish each and every one. I tell people that I treat them the way that the Vatican treats the Shroud of Turin. I have literally used tweezers to remove dog hair from them at times, not wanting to cause excess wear on them by using a sticky hair removal roller thing. I've put a lot of thought into the obvious need to protect and preserve their integrity, but I still haven't found a perfect method. I'll run through my experiences on this subject quickly for you, dear reader:

HANGERS:  Using hangers to store your shirts has many advantages: it keeps the shirts flat so there is no folding/creasing of the printing; you can store a lot of shirts in very limited space; it is a fairly good method for their display, as you can quickly whisk through them as you show them off. This is probably the preferred storage method for most collectors.

But the problem I have with hangers is that they can disfigure the shoulders of the shirt, leaving it with pointy shoulders. I'm sure this sort of problem can probably be fixed with a little ironing or something, but that sort of maintenance isn't really in my wheelhouse. Plus I am scared of damaging the shirt with a hot iron.

FOLDING:  There is more than one way to fold a shirt, the most common being to fold them in half or in thirds.

 Looks great...until the ink starts to peel off :(

It's a very effective way of storing shirts. But the glaring problem with folding is that generally a folded shirt will have sharp creases; stacking them on top of each other will only sharpen the creases. And of course creases on printing will weaken the ink and eventually cause it to crack or even peel off. The pros would probably outweigh the cons more if this were an average shirt, but these Babymetal shirts are OUR PRECIOUSES!!! WE NEEDS TO PROTECTSES THEM!!!!!

So folding is a non-starter.

ROLLING:  Rolling is sort of similar to folding; it's a good solution if you will be storing your shirts in a drawer or on a shelf. Rolled shirts also have the advantage of taking up less space than folded shirts do - try it the next time you are packing for an extended trip. From my point of view, the main advantage of rolling vs. folding is that instead of a crease, you get only a gentle wide bend over the printing, so it is much easier on the ink.

The biggest problem I have with folding, though, is that it is the absolute worst in terms of display. On a rolled shirt, you can generally only see the top 6 inches of the printing.

Not particularly envy-enducing...

 

Personally, I have decided to sacrifice the quality of display and go with rolling in the interest of it being best for maintaining the integrity of both the cloth & printing.

 I do sometimes fold shirts if I have multiples of the same design

So, does anyone have any other methods for storing their T-shirts? I'd be very interested to know if anyone has a better way. Let me know in the comments!