Some Girls

She built her reputation on those lips. Bee-stung, fleshy, insolent lips that she made even more androgynous by slathering their expanse with red glitter. Mick Jagger’s was the first mouth that designer Leslie Gardner committed to cotton for her Smashing Grandpa line of retro-’70s glam-rock T-shirts, well before the product launches of Iggy Pop, T-Rex and Bowie.

“I’m trying to re-create the kind of shirts you would find at a thrift store,” Gardner says. “Stuff you would originally have seen at a Led Zeppelin or KISS concert.” Although Mick’s glitter lips retail for about $30 at American Rag, NaNa Trading, Lifestylz and Funky Town, the retrograde concert T-shirt industry has blossomed into something far more Warholian in the three years since Gardner began production. At Fred Segal, a value-added, mid-priced Ted Nugent sneers and sparkles out of a thrift-store jersey pocked with rhinestones, waiting patiently for someone to take him home to the tune of $415. “I know what it takes to put those rhinestones in one by one,” Gardner, 34, allows, “but I don’t see where it gets to $800. You can buy a $2 rhinestone machine and do it yourself.”

The inflationary spiral might signal the trend’s bitter end, so Gardner has hedged her bets with a line of pulsating hot pink, fuchsia and red peekaboo tops. Held together by leather laces or safety pins, the new designs take inspiration from Blondie and the Cars.

As for Mick’s mouth, it seems incapable of keeping the bloated concert T-shirt phenomenon afloat too much longer. Not long ago, Gardner and a few friends were privileged to accompany her design deity on a whirlwind party tour of the Hollywood Hills. As she danced with Jagger, her imagination was in no danger of plastering this Smashing Grandpa’s lips in glitter or rhinestones. “He didn’t have any lips,” Gardner laughs, somewhat sadly. “When you get older, your lips shrink.”