A thief stole $1,200 worth of vintage T-shirts from a South Philly boutique

At first, Nick DeMarco, co-owner of Forbidden Closet Vintage in South Philadelphia, didn’t realize his boutique had been robbed. But opening up Labor Day morning, he quickly noticed something awry about a row of vintage music T-shirts. Mainly, the huge gap in them.

“This doesn’t look good,” DeMarco remembers saying.

Inspecting the thinned-out rack, DeMarco and his best friend and partner, Chris Shelley, knew they’d been hit hard. Someone had pried open the back door and stolen nearly two dozen valuable music tees in the night. Shirts were from the 1990s and 2000s for acts ranging from Radiohead and the Killers to Iron Maiden and Metallica. There was a shirt with a painting of Billy Joel and a Prince tour shirt. Plus, hard-to-find heavy metal tour shirts for bands like P.O.D. and Morbid Angel. They estimate that, with prices ranging from $40-$150, about $1,200 in tees were gone.

Any loss hurts, but especially so for a new business like Forbidden Closet, which opened in June. The shop has been a longtime dream of DeMarco and Shelley, both 29, and from Mount Laurel, and lifelong collectors of vintage sports and music apparel.

“We’re trying to curate things we think a Philadelphia person would want,” said DeMarco.

That includes tons of vintage Penn, Drexel, and Temple gear, old-school Phillies and Eagles puffers and hoodies, and throwback banners and pennants, like a decades-old pennant promoting the Liberty Bell and Betsy Ross House.

But it’s not all Philly-themed. The cozy boutique also offers wall-to-wall racks of nostalgic pop culture apparel.

“Things your dad would have worn,” DeMarco said.

Like the missing music tees.

Wanting their stuff back, the friends quickly alerted local consignment shops and vintage stores to keep an eye out for the stolen shirts and posted an index of the shirts online.

“If you see any of these in bunches pop up in the neighborhood, yard sales, marketplace, etc., please let me know,” DeMarco wrote the morning after the robbery on a South Philly Facebook group page. “We don’t want to press charges or anything. We just want our stuff back.”

They don’t know who could have taken the shirts but suspect someone may have scouted the shop during the day.

“They probably just saw the pricetags and figured they’d come back and get them,” DeMarco said.

Pawning the obscure shirts may not be easy for thief, they said, especially with word getting out about the robbery.

“The Morbid Angel 99 tour shirt is a dead giveaway,” DeMarco said.

They are not hopeful they’ll find the shirts. But they are trying to see the bright side.

Perhaps in haste, or perhaps guided by love of ‘90s-era Death Metal more than profit, the thief left valuables on the shelf, DeMarco noted.

“They didn’t touch the Phillies and they didn’t touch the Eagles,” he said like a mantra.

Moreover, the response has been overwhelming, they said, both online and in the neighborhood. New customers are coming.

On Thursday, they included Dan Campbell, 38, lead singer of the Philly band the Wonder Years, who decided to stop in after seeing the post about the stolen shirts.

For Campbell, who used to live around the corner from the shop and made sure to post a photo of an Eagles sweater purchase on social media, vintage clothing is more than just style and fit.

“It’s community, he said.