“Hey, that was my music back when I was your age,” Mr. Jenkins told his daughter. “Do you even know that music?” In jest, he asked her to name a couple of Rolling Stones songs.
“Obviously, I couldn’t tell him any as I’ve never listened to the band before,” said Ms. Jenkins. She still wears it regularly, along with a more recently acquired Metallica T-shirt, which is “even more of my generation,” said her father. Ms. Jenkins can’t name a song from Metallica, either.
What is now a running joke in the Jenkins family has become a broader trend in the cyclical world of fashion, with boys and girls of younger generations wearing old rock band T-shirts despite having never listened to the music.
Jacob Gillick, a 28-year-old teacher in St. Louis, Mo., who described himself as a “teenage metal-head growing up,” said that during the last school year, he would see five to six middle-school students a day wearing a T-shirt of a rock band he recognized from his own adolescence.
“It’s a huge letdown when you realize they don’t actually listen to it,” he said.
Major fashion retailers like PacSun and Urban Outfitters offer products like Nirvana tees and The Who pullovers. In a survey last year by online retail company RushOrderTees, the top nine music T-shirts owned by respondents were all artists from the 1990s or earlier, with AC/DC taking the top spot. (Ariana Grande came in at No. 10.)
Some attribute the surging demand to social media, which can expedite aesthetic trends without bringing the music fandom along.
Rockabilia, an online seller of rock music merchandise, had a supply of 300 T-shirts for Static-X, a heavy metal band that formed in the ’90s, sitting around for years. Suddenly, all the shirts sold out in less than 24 hours. Messages filled Rockabilia’s email inbox and phone lines, seemingly from young teenagers, asking when it would restock the Static-X shirts.
“We were kind of curious so we asked, ‘Are you a fan of the band?’ And they had no idea what it even was,” said Frankie Blydenburgh, a co-owner of Rockabilia. He and his team later discovered that a TikTok in which someone who happened to be wearing a Static-X shirt had gone viral.
Tony Campos, the bassist for Static-X, doesn’t mind if people wear the band’s shirts without listening to the music. “I used to be more of a purist,” said Mr. Campos. “But to me, that’s just closed-mindedness.…A big part of bands’ income these days is merchandise sales. So the more you can get out there, the more you’re going to be able to make a living.”
Brian Ebejer, who goes by the stage name Edsel Dope and is the lead singer of the heavy metal band Dope, formed in 1997, echoed the sentiment. “Honestly, I’d rather a kid buy my merchandise than listen to my music, because I make more money from a shirt than him listening to my music for free on Spotify,” he said.
Some rock-band-shirt-wearing teenagers are actually fans of the music. Ben England, 18, and Luka Owen, 19, became best friends over a mutual love of rock music. They are also friends with Ms. Jenkins, and they noticed all the merchandise worn by their fellow students.
“Whether it is Rolling Stones, Nirvana, Led Zeppelin, or Sublime, it seems like you can’t go a day at school without seeing one of these shirts,” they wrote for their student newspaper last March.
With band shirts now a purely aesthetic choice, they have found themselves misidentified as nonfans. Mr. Owen recalled wearing one of his Led Zeppelin shirts while out shopping. At the counter, the cashier asked if he could name five Led Zeppelin songs.
He certainly could. “I own every album that they’ve ever produced,” Mr. Owen said. The cashier gave him his items for free after finding out he was actually a fan.
Merchandise for Cannibal Corpse, a death metal band from the ’90s, found new popularity after Kourtney Kardashian Barker was pictured last year wearing the band’s shirt, borrowed from her husband, Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker.
After her fashion choice received backlash from Cannibal Corpse fans, Mr. Barker publicly jumped to her defense. Even though she isn’t a hard-core fan, he said, why not allow her to celebrate the music? The couple didn’t respond to a request for comment.
“Since then, it’s become a fashion statement. Now Cannibal Corpse merch is more popular than ever before,” said Rockabilia’s Mr. Blydenburgh.
