1991 Bell Biv DeVoe White T-shirt

“Hip-hop, smoothed out on the R&B tip, with a pop feel appeal to it” — Michael Bivins’s one-line thesis to the New York Times in 1990, delivered as he and Ricky Bell and Ronnie DeVoe were building out the post-New-Edition splinter group that would effectively define New Jack Swing alongside Teddy Riley’s broader production catalog across the following two years. Poison went quadruple-platinum on MCA Records inside eighteen months of its March 1990 release, with “Poison,” “Do Me!,” and “B.B.D. (I Thought It Was Me)?” placing Bell Biv DeVoe at the center of the WPLJ-rotation window that defined early-1990s urban radio. This white cotton tee comes from the 1991 touring cycle around the record: a full-color photograph of the trio in matching mustard-yellow outerwear and olive-and-beige cargo gear sits at the chest with “BBD” set above in red paper-torn letters, and the back reproduces the “BBD / DOPE” wordplay in heavy red-and-black block type.