Monterey Bay Aquarium Revives 30-Year-Old Otter Tee Worn by Taylor Swift

(Update on Oct. 16 at 10:30 a.m.: The campaign featuring the otter shirts is now live. The aquarium’s goal is $1.3 million. )

When Pleasanton resident Stephanie Haller settled in for a showing of Taylor Swift’s new movie, she didn’t expect to get hit with a wave of nostalgia.

The movie featured behind-the-scenes footage of Swift directing a music video for a song off her new album The Life of a Showgirl, all while donning a vintage otter T-shirt from the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

As a born-and-raised Bay Area kid, Haller immediately recognized the shirt.

“I was taken back to the ’90s,” Haller said. “I’m pretty sure I had that shirt originally. I had to ask my mom, actually, and be like, ‘Did I have that?’”

Fans online became enamored with the shirt featuring an illustration of two otters floating in the water side-by-side, especially since it ties into Swift’s personal love for the animal, shared by her fiancé and Kansas City Chiefs football player Travis Kelce.

“All I use the Internet for is sourdough and when Travis sends videos of otters on his Instagram,” she recently said on Kelce’s podcast. 

But the viral shirt has a special connection in the Bay.

“We also heard from a couple of friends that here, in some of the local movie theaters, people actually cheered when they saw that it was an aquarium shirt,” said Liz MacDonald, the director of content strategy at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

MacDonald said after the movie premiered on Oct. 3, the aquarium started receiving a plethora of fan messages alerting them about Swift’s shirt and saw “a wave of $13 donations.” 13 is Swift’s favorite number.

“There definitely were some folks who were like, ‘Huh, what’s up with this?’” MacDonald said of the $13 donations. “But we do have enough Swifties on the team.”

Amid all of the love, MacDonald knew that Monterey Bay Aquarium had to find the shirt.

A scramble for otters

The movie — which earned $34 million at the domestic box office — sparked a search for the artwork almost immediately.

The biggest hurdle, MacDonald said, was that the shirt was made in 1993 and the aquarium didn’t have the digital files to “pull up right away.”

“It became sort of a huge team effort between both us at the aquarium and the Swifties online [who] were also doing a lot of their own sleuthing and pinging us about what they were finding,” she said. “Some of our long-term staff members were reaching out to former employees, former vendors. It really was anyone at the aquarium who had a lead.”

MacDonald said the aquarium’s art director started going through physical file boxes to find leads on the artwork. Eventually, he found the original invoices between the aquarium and the company that produced the shirt.

The company is now called Liberty Graphics, based in Maine. Monterey Bay Aquarium successfully got in contact with them two days later, on Monday.

Inspired by this search, Monterey Bay Aquarium and Liberty Graphics will be issuing a reprint of the otter T-shirts. MacDonald emphasized the eco-friendly nature of the shirts, which will use “water-based ink” and “100% cotton materials” that won’t “shed microplastics.

“The way that these shirts are produced is also intended to be really long-lasting,” she said. “A lot of times when we talk about fast fashion, there are things that are produced very quickly that go in and out of style very quickly. And they kind of start to fall apart and can’t even be worn after a couple times.”

It’s an opportunity, she said, for people to “think about how clothing is made.”

The shirts will be part of a campaign to support the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Sea Otter Program. Fans would have to donate $65.13 or more to the campaign to get the option to receive the shirt.

An important species

California’s sea otters were nearly hunted to the brink of extinction in the 1800s due to a booming fur trade. In fact, they were considered to be extinct entirely until 1938, when around 50 sea otters were found off the coast of Big Sur. 

Restoration efforts have allowed sea otters to make something of a comeback, with many of California’s sea otters gathering at Elkhorn Slough, a body of water between Santa Cruz and Monterey.

Sea otters are still considered an endangered species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, with around 3,000 southern sea otters in California.

“They’re a really important species,” MacDonald said. “They really help make kelp forests a healthier, more resilient forest. And that provides habitat to hundreds of other species of fish and invertebrates. It also really helps the coastline because when you have a healthy kelp forest off the coast, that’s protecting the coastline from storm surges.”

Sea otters are protected by federal law, which was established in the early ’70s.

However, those rules may be subject to change, as the Trump administration proposes a change to the Endangered Species Act that would make it so that destroying an animal’s natural habitat would not be considered committing “harm” to the species. This would allow for things like mining, drilling and tree cutting.

The support for the aquarium work sparked by the otter shirt was “probably the best part of this whole thing,” MacDonald said, especially since the aquarium had been taking care of baby sea otters before it even fully opened its doors in 1984. “The attention it’s bringing to sea otters and the aquarium’s work, restoring and recovering the southern sea otter as a species.”