
Ask anyone who grew up in Florida to tell you the best way to run away from an alligator1 and you’ll invariably hear a version of this response: “You gotta zigzag. They can outrun you in a straight line, but if they try to keep turning, it’ll slow them down enough.” No matter how far you live from a river or golf course or runoff pond, whether your school was public or private, the zigzag maneuver is the cornerstone of a Florida education.2
In a year, I’ll have lived in New York for as long as I lived in Florida—a milestone that’s prompting some mild existential angst (can never truly call myself a New Yorker, can’t afford to live here forever, can I still call myself a Floridian, etc., etc.). And as the chronological distance from my time in Florida increases, my feelings about it have grown more complicated. There’s nostalgia, of course—a halcyon glow, a halo effect (is the humidity really that bad? yes!). But there’s also defensiveness, especially against those who use it as a punch line. And grief, too: for the overdevelopment, the wreckage left by increasingly brutal hurricane seasons, and the extremist politics and hostility toward marginalized groups that have taken hold of so much of my home state.
Amid all of those feelings, an unexpected and immense fondness still lingers. And to cope, I’ve been—you guessed it—buying vintage t-shirts!!!
To be fair, my Florida t-shirt collection started a long time ago. In high school, we created our own custom t-shirts, with the permission of teachers who were too underpaid and tired to care what we printed (my friend Kelsey convinced our French teacher to let us conjugate the word ‘pamplemousse,’ which means ‘grapefruit’ en francais, on our French Honors Society shirts: “Est-ce que vous pamplemoussez? Oui, nous pamplemoussons, mais pas ce soir.”)3. As I began thrifting more assiduously in high school, my collection grew—an old Halloween Horror Nights t-shirt from Universal Studios, a Miami Heat t-shirt, a Florida Lottery t-shirt, a Weeki Wachee Swamp Fest t-shirt with a menagerie of anthropomorphized animals playing musical instruments (ever seen a raccoon play a xylophone?). My mom’s friend handed down years of t-shirts from an annual coastal clean-up. But as I began to return to Florida less frequently, and as the thrift store t-shirt offerings (plentiful in the mid-00s) dwindled, I turned to the internet.
I can find a good Florida t-shirt on any online secondhand platform, but the best one for this mission is eBay, by a long shot. I’ve gone over the reasons for this in an earlier post, but eBay’s filtering options allow for a specificity that Poshmark, Mercari, et. al, do not.4 On eBay, if you find a shirt you like, it’s easy to use image search or more specific keywords to find duplicates, perhaps in a different size or better condition. And when you do find duplicates, the pricing is always wildly, amusingly variable—you can tell who knows what they have and who doesn’t!
As of now, these are the Florida items I have in regular rotation:

So what is it about these t-shirts? On the surface, they’re a fun conversation piece, but also hope that each time I wear one, it pushes back against the idea of Florida as a monolith, as just the home of Ron Desantis and Marco Rubio5 and Stand Your Ground (and now ‘Alligator Alcatraz’…what a demented, extralegal, and inhumane concept).
When I wear a Florida t-shirt, I’m hoping in some small way to impart my fondness for my oft maligned and misunderstood home state: a place where my dad can identify a neighborhood dolphin for years by the notch on his fin (ask us about Notchy!), where afternoon thunderstorms bruise the sky, a place that raised and cultivated some notable feminists, environmentalists, and civil rights advocates (among them Marjory Stoneman Douglas and her crusade to preserve the Everglades), where hand-painted wooden signs advertise roadside honey and oranges and boiled peanuts, a place with crumbling cigar factories and great indie music scenes and manatees and giant oak trees covered in Spanish moss.
For what it’s worth, I think anyone can wear a Florida t-shirt! Even if you’ve never set foot in the state, I don’t see it as stolen valor; on the contrary, I know that when I see a Florida t-shirt out in the world, it’s probably being worn by someone who also finds that weirdness endearing.6 The only t-shirts I object to are the fake or offensive ones—give me a weird vintage t-shirt over a racist Abercrombie & Fitch graphic tee advertising an imaginary business any day!
So… from the anthropological goldmine of eBay… here’s a selection of some of the best vintage Florida t-shirts out there.7
First of all… there’s a whole genre of t-shirts dedicated to surviving hurricanes:

Here are some amazing ones from Kennedy Space Center8:

Let’s not forget the nature and the wildlife:

Florida is also big on racetracks and motor sports. (There are even some t-shirts out there from when greyhound racing was still legal in Florida… which was literally UNTIL THE END OF 2020—while I would never wear one of those, I think they’re still important artifacts.)

And an assortment of some other Florida-specific t-shirts… what is the Panama City Beach Good Girl Club and how can I join?!?!

P.S. If you’re curious, here’s some nonfiction that expanded my own ideas of Florida:
Bubble in the Sun by Christopher Knowlton: All about Florida’s role in the Great Depression (weird!) and what Florida’s ‘Roaring Twenties’ were like
A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America's Hurricanes by Eric Jay Dolin: Not fully centered on Florida, but a gripping account of five centuries of American hurricanes that traces how our understanding has grown from overlooked Indigenous insight to today’s meteorological methods
Florida! edited by A24: An untraditional guidebook celebrating Florida’s oddities without condescending or sensationalizing (though I will say, the Gulf Coast is a bit underrepresented in here!)
Through the Groves by Anne Hull: A journalist’s memoir of coming out and coming of age in rural central Florida in the 1960s
Waterproof: Evidence of a Miami Worth Remembering edited by Mario Alejandro Ariza: Bought this at Dale Zine Shop in Miami—it’s a collection of hundreds of short pieces from Miami residents, answering the question “What will you miss when Miami is gone?”
This is debatable—some people argue you should run in a straight line, as alligators can only sustain short bursts of speed. I’ve never been charged by an alligator, so I don’t know how I’d react in real life, but the zigzag method was taught to at least a generation of schoolchildren!
“Do you grapefruit? Yes, we grapefruit, but not tonight.”
And on eBay, you can tell how many search results there are! I hate that Poshmark is just an opaque endless scroll! Can someone who knows more about coding tell me if this would be a difficult feature for Poshmark to add?
…and Rick Scott… and Donald Trump… and a whole number of odious politicians
I’ve never been to Don Garlits Museum of Drag Racing in person because the only time I drive through Ocala is on my way out of Florida, when I’m with my dog and can’t go in! I’m planning a Florida road trip this winter without the dog, and that museum is on the list.
Almost all of these are 100% cotton—there are a few cotton/poly blends if the design was really great, but I only buy 100% cotton t-shirts if possible!
Searching “outer space” is a good cheat code to finding vintage t-shirts with crazy designs, also!
All my best vintage tees are Florida tees! ❤️ now which one do I add to the collection?? This has to be one of my all time favorite RFC posts. Zigzag! lol
As a native Floridian and former Brooklyn resident who recently moved back to the sunshine state / my hometown after 16 years elsewhere- I feel very seen and echo all your love and conflicted feelings! It feels so rare to read positive representations about this special and complicated place. And my most fave vintage tees are all Florida related. ❤️🍊🐊