I discovered ONEITA in 2011 when I bought a used 1992 USA Basketball t shirt from Flight Club's NY small but powerful vintage store. It immediately became my favorite t shirt because of its almost indescribable color (white with these donegal ish specs of grey sprinkled throughout) and firm yet comfortable structural integrity. This Flight Club NY vintage store deserves its own story. It was like nothing I had ever seen before. In my first trip, I bought this dream team ONEITA t shirt, a Wu-Tang Beach Towel, John McEnroe Challenge Court sneakers from the 80s and an 8 foot Michael Jordan poster. No item cost more than $75.
For now, back to ONEITA. We became friends with curator and founder of COMMA, Josh Matthews, when he visited our Sep 2019 putting green in NYC. During a conversation with Josh we learned that he was the curatorial mastermind behind thee Flight Club NY vintage shop and thus the reason why we know about and now cherish ONEITA t shirts.
While ONEITA made great products, it didn't survive to see the 21st century.
ONEITA filed for bankruptcy in early 1998 after operating at a $40 million loss in 1997. It attributed its struggles to "too much manufacturing capacity in the industry and a surplus of clothing already in the marketplace."
While we may new clothes and sometimes new t shirts at Whim Golf, we are fully aware of the clothing industry's sustainability problem and how we participate in it. We make clothes that are timeless from our perspective. We want to wear them now and will wear them when we're 50, 60, 70 years old. Our approach bucks the concept of what's in-style or out of style with the hope that people will cherish and keep Whim Golf clothes for a long time.
Today, we're releasing limited ONEITA t shirts in collaboration with artists and friends Archie Lee Coates (Otto Milo) and Chuck Anderson (NoPattern). We prompted each artist with the idea to depict the hard-to-come-by, birds eye view, of a golfer mid-swing.
You might hear people say that shirts are art. People collect t shirts and refuse to give them away even if they don't wear them. This ONEITA collaboration is no exception - these tees are art.