It has hot designer labels.
It fetches top dollar at trendy boutiques.
It's a hot look around town, and it's a ...

T-shirt

By A. SCOTT WALTON
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Wearing T-shirts doesn't equate with dressing down anymore.

Now that Atlanta boutiques are selling them for as much as $100 each — and people are wearing them to the toniest nightspots in town — T-shirts qualify as genuine fashion articles.

But these versions are a far cry from the standard white Fruit of the Looms that have been wardrobe staples for years. Ramped up versions feature bright colors and abstract graphics, along with ever-increasing price tags.

In some circles, these stylish tees convey status, just like customized tire rims or limited edition sneakers. And retailers say that men and women have grown so accustomed to paying premium prices for jeans in recent years that they don't balk at spending top dollar for T-shirts either.

"Right now, T-shirts are my best-selling category," said Bill Hallman, owner of trendy boutiques in Virginia Highland and Little Five Points. T-shirt sales have been so strong that Hallman is in the process of transforming Flair, his Virginia Highland shoe boutique, into a T-shirt emporium called T-Bar. It's scheduled to open late this fall with a seletion of tees in the $35 to $100 range.

"I'm a little surprised," said Hallman, "but I also saw this coming two years ago when we first started selling T-shirts by Rogan for $40 each. At the time, they were the highest priced tees we'd ever sold. But we sold them like crazy."

These "premium" T-shirts — so-called because of higher pricing, tailored fitting, quality fabric and elevated design — helped bolster a 7.1 percent increase in T-shirt sales in 2004, according to the NPD Group, a New York-based market analysis firm. The $17.9 billion category includes perennially popular undershirts and athletic tees, and has outpaced overall apparel sales, which rose just 4 percent over the previous year, to generate $173 billion in revenue.

Demand for premium tees is fueled, in part, by collectors like Larry Luk, a graphic design student at Buckhead's Portfolio Center for Design and Art Direction.

Luk, 24, owns at least 200 tees, wears them almost daily and generally spends $30 to $70 for each. He said that peers at school wear tees just as regularly, to class as well as to nightclubs.

"I love anything with strong graphics, and T-shirts are one medium that features them," Luk said. "I like to buy the ones with ornate prints, or the ones with a punk look to them."

Like many collectors, Luk seeks out styles not likely to be sold in mainstream stores.

"Even if I'm just wearing a basic black T-shirt, it's going to be a great-looking one," he said. "Not one that anyone could get at the Gap."

Fellow collector, Ron Lewis of Athens, is one of many T-shirt afficianados who've gone beyond buying them to producing them. Lewis, 29, gained cult following in the T-shirt collecting community by winning $2,005 in an online design competition conducted by the Chicago-based e-commerce site, Threadless.com.

Visitors to the site participate in polls that help select the winner. Threadless.com then prints up T-shirts for sale on the site.

Lewis' winning submission — depicting a cartoonish war scene inspired by the board game Battleship — has sold out in both the men's and women's versions, modestly priced at around $20. The web site also is weighing the notion of reprinting Lewis' shirt.

Even more gratifying: Lewis and his friends happened to be watching the season finale of NBC's "Scrubs" when the series' star, Zack Braff, appeared on screen wearing the "You Sunk My Battleship!" tee Lewis designed.

"To me, it's just an outlet to get my designs seen," said Lewis, whose real job is designing brochures and pamphlets for the University of Georgia's Student Activities division. "If you're in it to get rich, don't bother."

Travis Pitts, an Athens-based freelance illustrator concurs. Pitts is another collector turned creator who has earned $1,250 in cash and credits toward purchases from Threadless.com for his submissions.

"For me, it's not so much about the money as it is the exposure," Pitts said. "Some people who have been in the 'business' longer feel that Threadless may be ripping off naive artists with a one-time-only fee on something that may be printed several more times without royalties to the designer. Yet there are a lot of professionals who submit; mainly as a fun exercise and maybe to pay a bill."

For Farshad Arshid, premium, $30 to $90 T-shirts have provided the steadiest revenue stream since he opened Standard sportswear boutique in Buckhead two years ago. According to Arshid, the T-shirts appeal to customers because of their intense graphics, crafty embellishment and distressing techniques similar to those applied to designer jeans.

"T-shirts are part of a lifestyle now," Arshid said. "You're not going to wear a $25 Urban Outfitters tee with your $250 jeans. You're going to rock something with more of a limited edition feel to it."