Online Ceramics began as a joke between two friends. Just one glance at their barebones website makes that clear. The story of a happy-go-lucky acid trip, a cross-stitched serpent and a whole slew of Grateful Dead-inspired tees and hoodies are juxtaposed over a page that a high school freshman made after a weekend course in HTML and CSS.

Founded in 2014 by Elijah Funk and Alix Ross, the two met in Ohio as art students in the local DIY punk and noise scene. Far removed from the traditional “art student” archetype, Funk and Ross bonded over communal cigarette breaks and discussions about their favorite records. A few years later, the two reunited in Los Angeles at a wedding and began their collaborative foray into the art world. A quick favor for a friend to design a shirt for a book fair spawned the idea to create their own line of apparel—one faithful to the DIY communities that molded them.

Funk and Ross’ unnamed project was officially dubbed Online Ceramics around 2017, just in time for the Dead & Co. tour. The idea was to use vivid imagery to convey a devoted message for Deadheads, while still creating visually stunning designs that anybody could enjoy—remaining inclusive while still offering a subtle nod for those in the know. The beauty of Online Ceramics is the intimate experience that Funk and Ross offer through both their website (even their personal cell phone numbers have been listed) and their unique hand-dye process, ensuring no two shirts are the same. It’s not about designing for a specific customer, but rather being able to meet and share their art with people all over the country who share a similar free spirit.

Stretching beyond just Grateful Dead-adjacent merch, Online Ceramics began participating in a variety of projects spanning the entertainment and arts communities. A24 Films, for example, tapped Funk and Ross for three collaborative T-shirts depicting scenes, typography and motifs from the bone-chilling thriller Hereditary. The LA-based label also collaborated with John Mayer on a Dead & Co. tour hoodie and T-shirt for his single New Light. Mayer later commissioned Funk and Ross to tie-dye his Supreme x Louis Vuitton Box Logo T-shirt and, recently, a white colorway of the Nike x Off-White Presto. Virgil Abloh has even been sighted wearing several Online Ceramics tees.

If anyone has surely taken notice of the upward trend of concert, tour and band T-shirts in the last few years, it’s Remington Guest. Noticing the irony of someone wearing a brand shirt when they don’t know the band or haven’t listened to their music, Guest decided to offer a satirical approach to band merchandise when he founded his brand Advisory Board Crystals.

Seeing bands recreate vintage T-shirts from their heyday, Guest came up with the ingenious idea of mocking this trend while simultaneously participating in it. Although the graphics and logo flips are instantly familiar, they are not a tribute or homage, but pure satire. Case in point: An Advisory Board Crystals' collaboration presented the first physical iteration of Wikipedia designed as a white long-sleeved shirt with information-related details and visual language derived from the internet. It's strange, but it also somehow makes sense.

The shirts themselves don’t represent any band or tour—they’re “Abc.” The name, however, isn’t just meant to evoke obscurity. An actual crystal enthusiast, Guest uses inks and dyes derived from minerals and stones to epitomize the organic essence of his brand.

Advisory Board Crystals solidified its “new-vintage” concept following the closing of American Apparel. With all American Apparel product officially deadstock, Guest utilizes its surplus of tees as his fabric of choice. The fact that the products are all produced in Los Angeles—and despite being decades old are all unworn—allows for a sort of intimacy and legitimacy that newer garments tend to lack. Infusing these deadstock T-shirts with the bold colors and psychedelic graphics derived from actual crystals, Guest manages to imbue a sense of vintage authenticity to garments that would otherwise feel brand new.

Through a variety of mixed media formats, contemporary American artist Joe Roberts explores psychedelic visuals in tandem with popular cartoon characters and cultural icons. Each of Roberts’ images share repeated motifs of comic book figures, logos and toys made with simple lines and shapes. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Mickey Mouse and even the Grateful Dead “stealie” are all mainstays in Roberts’ cryptic visual library.

In 2016, Roberts founded LSD World Peace. Named after his 160-page bound-and-sewn book, the brand is another vehicle for the San Francisco-based artist to disperse his animated machinations. Utilizing imagery from all corners of Roberts’ archive, LSD World Peace ceaselessly honors The Grateful Dead through a range of iconography. With Deadheads acting as one of the primary networks for the exchange of LSD (see: Ken Kesey’s acid experiments), it’s no surprise Roberts’ work is heavily informed by the psychedelic rock band. The Shakedown Street skeleton, the Skull & Roses rose and various reinterpretations of the “stealie” often appear in LSD Word Peace’s offerings, while Roberts’ classic Mickey Mouse motif is also featured throughout.

Thanks to the modern accessibility of his designs, as well as collaborations with the likes of Supreme and Paradis3, Roberts is on track to become one of the biggest names in streetwear.

Founded by Brendan Fowler and Cali Thornhill DeWitt, SOME WARE began as a music label and nightlife collective based in Los Angeles. The duo got together in 2014 when a chance encounter with the hardcore band Purity inspired the two to start their own record label. Recognizing the incubation period between recording and pressing a record, Fowler and DeWitt opted to release some merch in the meantime. T-shirts and hoodies served as filler in between music releases as a way to raise funds for upcoming records.

SOME WARE marked Fowler and DeWitt’s surprising, yet fitting transition from music to clothing. The duo’s first capsule consisted of long-sleeved tees adorned with loud graphics, most notably one which featured lyrics to the song “Ha” by rapper Juvenile as well as other pieces which featured text that read “LATEX” and “Some Ware Some Ware.” While Graphic tees are still the focal point of Fowler and DeWitt’s work, recently SOME WARE has moved on from simple merch and began to introduce cut-and-sewn pieces such as apron dresses, work pants and snap-closure belts, all rendered through a trippy, psychedelic lens. A long standing commitment to garment dyeing, made-in USA manufacturing and recycled cotton offer the same vintage feel that many band tees possess. It’s that sort of upcycled, responsible and honest mentality that has become the basis for the brand: “Wear Often, Wear Rough.”

While the brand appears more dormant today than it was in the past, SOME WARE's key founding members are still active in the art and fashion scenes which helped shape their work (and the work of SOME WARE).

Since its inception in 2009, Come Tees has developed something of a cult within a cult following. Despite a Kanye West co-sign in 2016, for founder Sonya Sombreuil, a celebrity endorsement of that magnitude doesn’t mean much. The L.A.-based designer handprints each shirt personally, believing in the intimate connection that begins with the production and ends when a customer wears the finished product. Simply put, DIY is at the center of the Come Tees universe.

Sombreuil was at the heart of the art-tee movement back in 2009, when the young designer bought her first four-color press. After months of coating screens at night and waking up at dawn to expose and wash them out, Sombreuil truly understood the meaning of DIY. When picking a name for her new line of hand-made clothing, she asked her brother to “come” up with a four-letter word to accompany “Tees,” resulting in the label’s simple name. The same free-spirited ethos is present throughout Sombreuil’s various works. Often inspired by her obscure tastes in art/music and incorporating elements from zine-like collages and hand-sketched figures, Come Tees brings DIY art to the forefront of streetwear. Each design evokes a sort of homespun quality, further strengthened through abstract symbolism, thought-provoking text and bold color-blocking.

Come Tees isn’t just another brick in the growing wall of DIY streetwear, it serves to further advance a burgeoning underground culture. Even if there are dozens of labels that fall under the psychedelia DIY umbrella, each label only serves to strengthen the subculture as a whole. Sombreuil says it best, “This is like that moment you were so excited about 10 years ago when people were all making EPs or something. This is that world, it’s just in streetwear, where you have all these personalities and all these players and they’re all taking part in this idea exchange.”

Petrified Good truly strikes the line between bootleg merch, customized product and garment recycling.

Straight from the mind from Austin Williams, Williams kicked off the brand while a student at the University of Dayton in Ohio. A combination of vintage repair and bootleg concert merch, Petrified Good is known for taking deadstock or archival pieces from brands like Patagonia (itself easily—albeit loosely—connected to the free-loving, Earth-conscious ethos of the Grateful Dead) and hand-embroidering, printing or stitching band logos—largely those from the graphic library of Aphex Twin, The Smiths, Fleetwood Mac, Neil Young and—you guessed it—the Grateful Dead.

Williams isn't just riding the wave of Grateful Dead hype with this endeavor; he considers himself a true "Deadhead". As he explained to Highsnobiety in 2018, "I think the resurgence of the merch just introduces more people to the Grateful Dead and what their music is all about."

With fans ranging from Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig to chef Matty Matheson, Petrified Good's limited drops often sell out quickly. Considering that Williams' designs manage to intersect at a few of style's current obsessions—vintage band and concert merch, gorpcore and sustainably-minded fashion—it feels like it couldn't be a better time to dive into Petrified Good's blend of retro-meets-modern DIY merch.