how do you know the pink henley wasn't red first? I always headcanon he dyed it around the red party
OOOH hi. OK this is gonna be a bit "trust me bro" on the sources cos I'm ill and tired and cba searching for them right now but. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about this as someone who is slowly creating a BJ clothing google doc.
A key bit of context to this is that Mike gets the henley (which we refer to as The Pink Shirt) and the faded red sweatshirt that he dyed for the party mixed up more explicitly in interviews before, so I'm assuming that is what he was doing here. When we as a fandom refer to The Pink Shirt I think we mean the henley. It's mostly a riff on that first and foremost. So if you mean his faded red sweatshirt, 100% that was dyed for the party and faded to a lighter colour over time.
Re the pink henley, it is less that I KNOW it didn't start off red, it's all headcanon really, there is just no evidence it DID start out red. The pink henley jumps onto the screen fully formed one day (can't remember the exact ep off the top of my head, sorry). He does have a red/hot salmon pink henley as well, which he continues to wear intermittently with the pink. This is first seen in S7s Commander Pierce (I think at last count I was still not able to fully determine whether there is only one of these red henleys that fades in colour or if they are two similar henleys, one more pink-red and one more orange-red.)**
(Also generally red dyed clothing doesn't really TEND to fade to pink in that way, not to that shade etc, as seen with said red sweatshirt. Pink isn't really just faded red.)
TLDR: there is no evidence it DID start out red, but there is also no evidence it didn't, so knock yourself out!
**(interestingly, or perhaps only interestingly to ME, initial detective work shows that it is possible he had at least two versions of a pink henley in the wardrobe dept, and you can mostly only tell them apart by the detailing at the shoulder seam. He also has two versions of the grey cut-off sweatshirt, only this seems to have been wholly a replacement rather than one he swapped out now and again like the henleys.
