Where to Get That Awesome ‘Hellfire Club’ Shirt From ‘Stranger Things’
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We see you: You’ve watched at least the first episode of Stranger Things 4 Part 1, and your eyes are on the “Hellfire Club” baseball tees worn by Hawkins High’s Dungeons & Dragons club. Well, let us play the role of Argyl and hook you up with some sick threads.
The shirts are part of the show’s continued '80s callback, though the style is even older, at least according to style lore. (It was named after Lord Raglan, whose tailors needed a new way of sewing his sleeves after a right arm amputation in 1815; he was injured in the Waterloo Campaign.) The raglan-sleeve T-shirt or baseball shirt features a single piece of fabric that extends up to the neckline—and not just the shoulder like a traditional tee—allowing for a wider range of motion. (This is why baseball players wear them in warmups.)
The design for Hawkins’ Hellfire Club: black sleeves on white, featuring Dungeon & Dragons symbols, including the games dice, a flaming sword, a mace, and the head of a horned devil.
The shirt will likely be this year’s version of Dustin’s trucker hat—and so pretty much the easiest group Halloween costume to organize. While there are no official sites yet for the shirt, plenty of independent retailers are selling versions of the shirt on places like Etsy.
Complete the look with a trucker hat (Dustin) or leather jacket (Eddie).
Was the Hellfire Club a real Dungeons & Dragons club?
Not a D&D club, but the “Hellfire Club” was a historically real organization established in early 18th century Ireland. It began as something of a special interest group, running with the secular ideas of Enlightenment thought and parading these blasphemies in the form of public drunkenness, orgies, and—at least by some accounts—Satanic rituals.
That’s obviously not the “Hellfire Club” we’re talking about in Stranger Things, though it may be the club’s namesake—a group of social outcasts banding together over the thing they love. Also, maybe summoning Satan.
While we don’t know the origins of the club’s name (“hellfire” is a spell in D&D, though), their place in Hawkins’ social scene isn’t far afield from their debaucherous, wigged Irish counterparts. Stranger Things also mentions the moral panic Dungeons & Dragons inspired in the 1980s—where parents became convinced that their children were actually being cursed and possessed by demons.
This public mania is thanks to Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons (BADD), which launched information campaigns through conservative Christian outlets after its founder’s son committed suicide in 1982; she believed the board game was the cause.
In an interview with the BBC about the decade, David Waldron, author of Roleplaying Games and the Christian Right: Community Formation in Response to a Moral Panic, described the phenomenon. “Since fantasy typically features activities like magic and witchcraft, D&D was perceived to be in direct opposition to biblical precepts and established thinking about witchcraft and magic. There was also a view that youth had an inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality.”
Pick up a "Hellfire Club" shirt and prove scared parents right: there is no separation between Stranger Things and reality.
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