T Shirt

Two New Jersey members of the Pagans motorcycle group remained jailed last night, their bail set at $1 million each, on charges that they killed a man who was wearing a T-shirt of a rival club, authorities said. John Grover, 40, of Somerset County, went to Gatto's Sports Cafe in Manville on Sunday in a T-shirt emblazoned with the name of the New Rochelle, N.Y., chapter of the Hells Angels, Somerset County Prosecutor Wayne J. Forrest said. Pagans leaders had dispatched Peter J. Ciarletta, 28, and William "Rodent" Martin, 33, to the bar that afternoon to investigate a report that Hells Angels might be using it as a hangout, Forrest said.

Zhu Quan reached into a cardboard box and pulled out a blue T-shirt emblazoned with the Chinese characters for the Middle Kingdom embossed with a splash of red to symbolize rekindling of the flame of democracy in China. "Seven dollars each," said Zhu, 25, a high-energy physicist from Shanghai who is now working on his Ph.D. at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory outside Chicago. "If you buy 10, you get a dollar off. We learn capitalism fast. " Indeed, Zhu and hundreds of other Chinese students and scholars who gathered in Chicago last weekend for their first national conference seemed to be caught up in the American passion for buying and selling T-shirts to promote a political cause.

The movie poster for 1953's The Wild One is the perfect ad for the classic Gap look. A then-young Marlon Brando sits on a red motorcycle, thigh muscles bulging in tight jeans with a gleaming silver belt buckle. His leather jacket is slouched and open, exposing a plain white T-shirt. On his head is a hard-brimmed newsboy cap. At the time, the look was uncharted fashion territory. The outfit, amped up by Brando's brooding performance as biker Johnny Strabler, became the uniform for bad boys everywhere - before James Dean, before Fonzie, before Nelly.

They went to the 2d Avenue Beach yesterday morning, wearing buttons, rainbow-colored gay-pride rings, and T-shirts emblazoned with pro-gay slogans and the names of their organizations. The National Organization for Women, Lesbian Avengers/NJ, LAMBDA families of New Jersey. Some carried handmade posterboard signs protesting hate, bigotry and violence against gay people. Others carried rainbow-colored gay-pride flags. One by one, the leaders of the 10 women's and gay-rights organizations climbed up on a battered green pickup truck and addressed the 100 people from Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York who had gathered on the boardwalk along the haze-covered beach in Monmouth County to protest violence against, and intolerance of, gays and lesbians.

These days, 11-year-old Kathy Lloyd makes plenty of effort to do her homework, clean up the school hallways and keep quiet during class time. After all, the more responsibly she acts, the better chance she has to earn a PRIDE T-shirt. And everyone at Neil A. Armstrong Middle School in Bensalem, it seems, wants a purple PRIDE T-shirt - with the words "I've got the power of Armstrong PRIDE" emblazoned on it. PRIDE (Personal Responsibility in Daily Effort) is a year-old program that has "changed the entire atmosphere," said principal William Nichols.

The beleaguered PTL Club used jugglers for Jesus yesterday, begging viewers to write their cable systems to keep the program on television, but a T-shirt company needed no such public appeals to sell its wares in the wake of the troubles of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. On television, co-host Doug Oldham said: "They're wanting PTL and other shows like it removed from cable systems of America. We get letters and calls coming in daily wanting to pull PTL off the air. " Then - despite the Rev. Jerry Falwell's pronouncement Monday that there would be no more "sideshows" on The PTL Club - the program was given over to a couple from an organization called Alleluia Circus intent on proclaiming the gospel through juggling and acrobatics.

One of the hottest fashion items in town this month may be a T-shirt. Not just any T-shirt - the white one with a two-tone blue bull's-eye target on the front, and the words "Fashion Targets Breast Cancer. " It's a limited-edition number created by the prestigious Council of Fashion Designers of America to raise funds to fight breast cancer. And it's proving that a good cause can be a great incentive to buy. Jane Carton, fashion director at Saks Fifth Avenue in Bala Cynwyd, said the store's first shipment sold out in a couple of days.

Neil Young and Crazy Horse will display their talents on the stage of the Philadelphia Civic Center tonight, but on display in the lobby will be the talents of Jerry Klause. Jerry who? Jerry Klause, T-shirt maven. Last year, his Cape May Court House, N.J., company, Ocean Atlantic Textile Screen Printing (affectionately known as OATS), printed more than 17 million T-shirts. About 75 percent of them came off the presses emblazoned with the images of rockers such as David Bowie, Bob Dylan, AC/DC, Phil Collins and Paul McCartney.

Danielle Gunn's Mudd brand khaki pants, with a thin, black ribbon holding them together at the seams, were a funky bit of fashion heaven for the 15-year-old sophomore. To Gunn, they were the perfect choice for the first months of classes at Rancocas Valley Regional High School. But Raj Mackara, whose official school title is "dean of discipline," didn't share Gunn's fashion sense and slapped her with a dress-code violation. And a knee-length T-shirt. Instead of suspending students, sending them home, or having them wait in the discipline office for someone to bring them a change of clothes, school officials are making a fashion statement of their own. This year, for the first time, dress-code violators have the option of covering up their faux pas with a heather-gray oversized T-shirt.

To borrow a line from Stevie Wonder, it's hotter than July. And in these steamy, sticky days of summer, casual men's fashion has gone from trying too hard to not trying at all. Those splashy Hilfiger T-shirts and flashy Fubu jerseys have yielded to the basic white undershirt, a fashion staple that didn't go away as much as it went undercover. Yep, we're talking the crew-necked, short-sleeved 100 percent cotton, three-in-a-pack necessities that your dad wore under his crisp dress whites and flannel button-downs.