One of the most famous episodes of Seinfeld is entitled The Puffy Shirt.  It aired in 1993 and was about Jerry Seinfeld accidentally agreeing to wear a designer shirt on The Today Show. The episode became well known enough that the shirt now resides in the collection at the Smithsonian. Julian, a commenter on the Smithsonian’s website claims that the shirts were made by a clothing company called H20 for a Hollywood Boulevard clothing store named Antenna, and that they were based off Prince’s shirt from Purple Rain.  He also noted that he sold the shirt to the stylist for the episode.

The shirt appears again the next year in 1994 on David Hyde Pierce as Niles Crane in the episode of Frasier entitled A Mid-Winter’s Night Dream. While it is certainly the same shirt design, the question is – is it the exact same shirt?  We can’t know for sure, but a few things can point us in the right direction.  First, both Frasier and Seinfeld were NBC shows. Remember the past example of the CBS Carol Burnett Show costumes making a later appearance on the CBS show Designing Women? The second thing to note is that after the shirt was done being used for Seinfeld, it likely would have been placed into costume stock, allowing it to be used again by another production. The television show Frasier needed a pirate costume, a basic request that could easily be pulled from stock rather than shopped for. Would the designer from Frasier have purchased this same shirt from Antenna, or just pulled a basic costume ensemble from rental stock, grabbing the shirt that had been used in Seinfeld? Again, we can’t know for sure, but it makes more sense that such a simple costume request would have simply been pulled from stock.