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 …

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 …