Los Angeles

Mustache Brigade

During summer, nostalgia's pull is so strong, it can make you pine for things you didn't even do. Slap that idea on a t-shirt, and call it Mustache Brigade.

A sub-brand of SoCal's MightyFine, MB's soft-to-the-touch, tagless cotton tees hearken back to sunny adolescence; their latest line, "Summer Reading", features covers of books you were assigned in high school, but never actually got to 'til convalescing from a hernia on your 29th birthday. The line-up includes the eyeballed skyline of The Great Gatsby; the noirishly nondescript face of The Invisible Man; Willie Loman's defeated, trenchcoated backside from Death Of A Salesman; the faded carousel horse of Catcher In The Rye; and the oversized title and screaming Yossarian of Catch-22. Other Mustaches evoke memories of stuff you actually might've been into, from old-school hip hop (a bemusclecar'd De La Soul) to PBS gangsta-ism (an Oscar The Grouch number reading "I'm So Street").

Some of MB's best shirts feature invented characters, like the Schoolhouse Rock-esque mascots admonishing you to Dunk and Spray -- very cool, but if they wanted to trigger nostalgia about something you did do, they'd tell you to lie about having had a girlfriend at camp.

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