How Plastisol Ink Reads on a Garment, Physically Run a thumb across the graphic on a decades-old skate or surf tee and the ink itself will often answer half the dating question before the tag does. That's because plastisol — the ink that dominated garment screen printing through the skate boom years and still dominates …

Two skate tees sit on the same table. Both carry the same late-80s graphic, the same washed-soft hand, the same faded ring of a logo across the chest. One is an original run worth real money to a collector; the other is a reprint pressed twenty years later off a scanned art file. Nothing on the front separates them. …

Not every piece of late-1980s skate apparel aged into a collector item. Most of it was worn to destruction — faded from sun, shredded at the cuffs, retired to the rag bin. The shirts that survived and now trade at premiums share a recognizable set of characteristics: iconic graphics tied to a specific cultural moment, …

Authenticating late-1980s and early-1990s skate apparel presents a particular challenge: the brands that produced it were small, fast-moving, and left almost no label archives. Bad Billy's — Billabong's short-lived skate sub-label, active from approximately 1987 into the early 1990s — is a prime example. No official …

Original Bad Billy's apparel does not surface often. The label ran for a window roughly spanning 1987 through the early 1990s, distributed through surf and skate shops across Australia, the US, and Europe. Production volumes were not enormous — it was a sub-label, not a core range — and the decades since have done what …