When I started collecting a decade ago, I had a rule against buying shirts for shows I hadn’t attended. Then came a Prince and the Revolution shirt from the Purple Rain tour, which I found in the East Village for $45.

The fit was perfect, but it was more than that. The shirt seemed to telegraph everything I hoped to be: Masculine, if not butch. An iconoclast, but not a pedantically esoteric one.

So what if I hadn’t been there? I had seen him on every tour since 1993. And it wasn’t as if I was spending $150, a price only a moron would pay. Nor did I take my T-shirt to the tailor, a practice popularized by Jennifer Aniston.

Those rules broke down soon enough. The Purple Rain shirt was my gateway drug.

It got to be tissue-paper thin, so I replaced it with one I found on eBay for $85. When the replacement didn’t fit as well, I had my neighborhood dry cleaner recut it to the shape of the one that was expiring. Last October, I wore the replacement to the gym and left it in the locker room, where it was snatched up by a thief with good taste.

Since Prince had died, prices were skyrocketing. So I forked over $220 to a seller in Malaysia for another one. While waiting for it to arrive, I fell down a rabbit hole known as Etsy. It has less merchandise than eBay but is better curated, with fewer counterfeits.

One of my favorite dealers is Patrick Klima of WyCo Vintage, whose clients have included Mr. Kallman and Axl Rose. Another favorite is Joe Rockwell, whose Etsy store, Rainbow Gasoline, teems with shirts from Joan Jett, Journey and Cyndi Lauper.