Photograph by Matthew Stockman/ALLSPORT/Getty Images
In the vintage clothing world, there’s a moment when one day you’ll find your childhood wardrobe on sales hangers. About five years ago, CC Indivero and Mike Huddleston of GVG Events, a pop-up host, started seeing clothes that they wore as kids in the summer of 1996. “These kids, who weren’t even alive then, began to bring duffel bags to our markets full of Atlanta Olympics shirts,” says Indivero. “At first, I laughed, like they think what I wore when I was 11 is cool, but now, it’s everywhere.”
Pass a vintage clothing market in Atlanta, and you’ll probably find gear from the 1996 Olympics. According to Indivero and Huddleston, Olympic apparel became a hot commodity just before the pandemic and has remained so. T-shirts, originally bought for around $20, sell anywhere from $30 to $50 in all sorts of colors and patterns: a dark-green backdrop to an orange fire emanating colorful stars, the electric-blue official mascot Izzy dancing on gray, and white polos with purple Olympic rings crisscrossing green branches.
Beyond shirts, there are huge sponsor banners, wide straw hats, Izzy plushies, purple, green, and orange fanny packs, and more that can have price tags well over three figures. “For me, the ’96 Olympics are a throwback to a simpler time, but I can’t pin down the reason why everyone else loves it,” Indivero says.
One reason could be the look. Keooudone Inthirat has been a vintage reseller for more than a decade, who frequents many of GVG’s pop-ups with his brand, Timeless Classics. “I think the Olympics saw Atlanta and decided they could do some cool [stuff] here with the digital age,” he says. The best example is Izzy, a computer-generated cartoon figure who holds a torch of multicolored stars. “All of that color and abstract patterns actually reflected the fashion sense of the ’90s. No other Olympics before had that.”
When he saw the vintage market for ’96 Olympics apparel explode, he started selling duplicate Olympic shirts from his own closet. Now, Inthirat focuses on obscure 1990s clothing from Atlanta via online finds and estate sales, the Olympics being his centerpiece. “Everyone wants to be part of Atlanta culture, and the Olympics are the perfect visual medium,” he says. “The young crowd gets something to latch onto that’s Atlanta, and the older folks get the nostalgia.”
The market for something in demand like the ‘96 Olympics showcases the tricky challenge of the vintage world: The finite supply of the past dwindles fast. Some replicas have even popped up, such as a T-shirt of the ’96 torch from Old Navy.
Tabitha Lee, the founder and owner of Vintageland ATL, a brick-and-mortar store in Little Five Points, expects prices for this nostalgia wear to rise even more. Lee started reselling vintage clothes in 2021, scouring estate sales for pieces. “If I found really rare Olympics stuff, it would put a notch in my belt as a reseller,” she says. “If estate sales even preview Olympics apparel, you have to get there at five or six in the morning to get it, and there’s gonna be a line.”
This article appears in our September 2025 issue.
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