It’s not often someone can get an official concert T-shirt from a band without attending the show, but this Thursday at the Ferguson Center will offer that chance for anyone whose favorite band may be broken up or passed on.

The vintage T-shirt guy, Brandon Gardner, will bring his biggest collection of T-shirts yet to the University for the fifth consecutive year.

“It’s all real stuff, real shirts from the 70s or 80s, not just reprints from the mall,” he said. “Each T-shirt is like a little time capsule where you either show some weird product that doesn’t exist anymore on the T-shirt or it’s your favorite band when they actually had a show. You can get the shirt that was at the show.”

This year a portion of the proceeds will be donated to a tornado relief fund, although the specific one hasn’t been picked yet.

“I freaking love Tuscaloosa, I’m a huge Roll Tide guy even though it doesn’t look like it by my clothes,” he said. “I was so devastated by what happened down here that for the first time ever I’m actually going to give money away instead of all the proceeds going to Brandon.”

The idea to hold a Vintage T-shirt sale started when Gardner and his wife were at a bar owned by their friend and there was a woman selling jewelry off a small table. Gardner doesn’t remember if it was his or his wife’s idea but it has been his side job ever since.

“Fortunately this is the most successful thing I’ve ever done on campus of any sort,” Gardner said. “I never graduated but I was here long enough to be a doctor.”

After he left Alabama, Gardner started working with his parents, who own an antique store, but realized that wasn’t exactly what he wanted to do. “One thing led to another and I became the Vintage T-shirt guy,” he said.

To find T-shirts for his sales, Gardner travels around to antique shows with his parents, but he said he has been a “T-shirt hoarder” for a long time. He said his favorite T-shirt is always the one he is going to find tomorrow because he gets so excited with every new T-shirt he finds.

“Really what a T-shirt is, is an American-invented form of clothing, so I feel like I’m preserving the history of an American made thing because now if you go anywhere and are flipping through the T-shirt rack, almost none of them are made in America, which is really sad,” he said. “Ninety-nine percent of my T-shirts were made in America.”

Besides sales at The University of Alabama, Gardner has held sales in bars in Birmingham and other colleges around the south. This Thursday’s show will feature around 2,000 shirts on racks set up in the TV lounge in the Ferg, which is to the right of the Information Desk.

For pricing on the shirts, Gardner does research on how much you could buy the same shirt for in other places and goes from there. For rare concert T-shirts, the prices will be much higher than the prices for shirts that were more widely circulated.

“This is going to be the biggest Vintage T-shirt sale I’ve ever had and the reason I know that is because I ran out of coat hangers,” he said.