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"At first they were just made with those fuzzy, felt, iron-on letters," Harris said. in Oakland, said she began seeing the shirts five or six years ago. "You'd think I was a funeral director or something," he said.Ĭheri Harris, a funeral director at Fuller Funerals Inc. Her mom's boyfriend killed her because she wouldn't give him the PlayStation." He was 18, " Dolendo said.ĭolendo lingered on a picture of a smiling 2-year-old girl with pink barrettes. " Jose Sanchez - he was shot three months ago, gang related. He keeps all the images of the departed on a computer, because often customers come by for repeat orders on death anniversaries and birthdays. I want to know what I'm making and who it's for," Dolendo said. "I always ask the customers how the person died. is also the bread and butter of Reagan Dolendo's family silk- screen business, Precious Memory, at the Southland Mall in Hayward. shirt?' Now half my shirt business is R.I.P.," E.J. "I was trying to push fashion, but people kept coming in, asking, 'Can you do an R.I.P. owns four clothing stores - three in Oakland and one in San Francisco's Bayview-Hunters Point. They graduated to a tent on a street corner, and now E.J. More than a decade ago, he and his brother rode around town on bicycles selling their clothing creations. would become such a big part of his fashion- design label, Mix It Up. The T-shirts stay on weeks, months and years after the funeral.Į.J., who got his start in high school designing rap album covers for friends, never thought R.I.P. has caught on particularly among young black men in dangerous neighborhoods who live in a constant state of mourning, Barrett said. roots farther, to West Africa and the Caribbean, where mourners often wear head scarves or handkerchiefs with the deceased's likeness on them, said psychologist Ronald Barrett, a professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles who has written extensively on African American funeral practices. shirts is a bit murky, but some entrepreneurs say the shirts originated in the South, during jazz funeral processions in New Orleans. "It's like, if you love him, why don't you have a shirt?" "It's immortalizing them on a T-shirt," he said. After spending his childhood snapping pictures of neighborhood friends, he had a large inventory when the people he knew started dying. "It's a way to show sympathy, mourning and grief," said Throwback City owner and photographer Aswad Hayes, who was one of the first to make R.I.P. Inside Throwback City, an East Oakland clothing store, one rack is jammed tight with the shirts - face after face of young homicide victims, with slogans such as "Gone but Not Forgotten," with their birth and death dates under the words "sunrise" and "sunset." Most of the city's 114 homicide victims last year wound up on T-shirts, according to city homicide inspectors and shirtmakers. T-shirts is drawing daily crowds in a Virginia mall.
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Teenagers wear them to school, and a memorial wall of R.I.P. shirts at a time for funerals, and groups wear them to nightclub birthday parties where the guest of honor is dead. Shirt-making enterprises now thrive in areas where the homicide rates are high, including parts of the Bay Area, New York, Washington, D.C., Miami and Chicago.įamilies order 100 R.I.P. But today they are an everyday ritual of death in many American cities, like choosing a casket or sending flowers. shirts - airbrushed or featuring scanned photos of lost loved ones - were just a novelty when they were first created a decade ago.
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Teens walking home from nearby Castlemont High School asked him to make "Rest in Peace" shirts for their dead friends, while drivers in thumping muscle cars screeched to the curb and placed orders for deceased relatives.
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His artistry drew a crowd to his easel at the corner of 90th Avenue and MacArthur Boulevard in Oakland. Flipping on his airbrush machine, he leaned toward a pristine white T-shirt and painted fat letters until they glistened as if carved out of red Jell-O: R. San Francisco Chronicle Metro#MainNews#Chronicle#ALL#5star#0422418461 Penni Gladstone Show More Show Less waves a just finished t-shirt on the street corner. San Francisco Chronicle Penni Gladstone Show More Show Less 2 of5 RIPXX_230_pg.JPGĮ.J. RIP shirts have become increasingly popular in the last 5 years, with rappers singing about them and even hipsters in SF wearing them even though they have no idea who the dead guy is. Story is about the art form and the business side of RIP shirts, or "dead man" shirts, which are t-shirts made with the picture of a young man killed by violence, often worn to funerals and in honor of the deceased. is an airbrush artist who makes RIP shirts in his shop in Oakland. E.J.'s hand airbrushed tee-shirts hang in the smoke on the corner of 90th and MacArthur.Į.J.