To Tie or not to Dye

Some Harvard students wear khakis and a button-down every day. Aaron C. Matamoro 05 wears tie-dye. For this Thayer resident, every day is tie-dye day.

Between the black pants, white blouses and jean jackets, Aaron stands out like a quetzal in a sea of green banana trees. Last Wednesday, he was sighted in Lit and Arts C-42 (Samurai) with a lovely combination of green, black and white tie-dye stripes. Specifically, a T-shirt tucked into a pair of sweatpantsthe entire ensemble made of tie-dye. Early this week, Aaron popped up again on the 3rd floor of Boylston, lurking in front of the Linguistics office with a multi-colored Grateful Deadesque combination of jeans, T-shirt and bandana, once again all tie-dyed.

I wear tie-dye every day, Aaron says. I started dying clothes five years ago and at the time I really liked the colors. Its really relaxing for me to tie-dye and I thought, As long as I am doing it, why not wear it? The tie-dye guru admits that his high school peers were not incredibly accepting of his color choices. At first they teased me and didnt like it so much but then they figured out that they couldnt change me. And they were right. Aaron literally wears his tie-dye creations every single day. Besides a few dressy clothes his wardrobe consists entirely of tie-dyed apparel.

Though Aaron left his dye fixture, acid and material at home in Cortez, Colo., he admits to nosing around his Thayer basement laundry room for the proper location to recreate his tie-dying factory. In Cortez, he sold T-shirts for $15 a pop at the local record shop and he has already received a number of requests for his creations from eager Harvard freshmen. Most of them say its cool that I wear tie-dye, he says. But some dont.

After receiving a tie-dye kit for Christmas, Aaron started to make his own designs that range from the popular spiral configuration to vertical lines, wavy lines and hearts. Those take a very long time to make, he says. People really like the vertical stripes but I can make lines that wander all around the shirt. You get to work with the curves and it affects the folding. Thats the part I like a lot. Aaron says that his father wears quite a bit of his tie-dye creations, but his mom not so much.

So far, Aaron says that most of the Harvard students have been pretty accepting of his style choices. And in the foreseeable future he predicts that his trade will arrive in Thayer basement. But you know it takes two loads of wash and two dryers to create one load of tie-dye. And thats a lot of laundry.