When thousands of fans line up for Apple Inc.'s opening of its Grand Central Terminal store Friday, many won't be queuing to ogle iPads.

They'll be there for the T-shirts.

Since Apple opened its first stores in 2001, it has handed out tees sporting the new store's name to the first 1,000 or so people through the door.

It is a ritual that is part of a cult around Apple's T-shirts. Some fans on Friday will be seeking to add another store-opening shirt to collections they've assembled as if they were rare baseball cards.

Truly discriminating Apple-shirt connoisseurs like Christopher Harrington will also be envying the tees on the Grand Central store employees' backs.

Mr. Harrington, a 40-year-old software designer, has endured freezing temperatures and hours-long lines to nab shirts from store openings on New York's Fifth Avenue, in his hometown of Greenwich, Conn., and elsewhere.

But the most-prized items in his wardrobe are a couple of Apple tees he's not really supposed to have: shirts that Apple's retail employees have worn as uniforms.

Apple requires store workers to wear the T-shirts that promote new products and the seasons. But the Cupertino, Calif., company, which keeps notoriously tight control over what employees know and say about it, forbids employees from selling, giving away or donating the retail employee T-shirts to charity, say current and former employees.

Mr. Harrington says Apple-employee friends sneaked him the contraband shirts with one condition: "I am under strict orders not to wear them," he says, adding that doing so would make him feel like an impostor similar to "dressing up as a police officer."

Apple has risen to the top of the tech world with a mix of hit products, a fanatical attention to Apple's corporate brand and insistence on tight control and secrecy.

That all extends to tees. The grand-opening and employee-uniform shirts are designed by Apple's Graphic Design group, which manages the look of all Apple's marketing from the iPhone box to its TV ads. Its giveaway T-shirts often carry the same "Designed by Apple in California" notice as do its iPhones and iPads.

As with Apple's products, some details about the tees' manufacturing remain a mystery. The shirts often carry labels from American Apparel Inc. or Hanes's Beefy-T brand. But some recent employee-uniform shirts—including this season's red holiday shirts—have been popping up with a tag that says "Made in Vietnam" on one side and "Apple" on the other, according to two of the tags.

A spokesman for Apple, which is known for its tightly managed supply chain, said he wouldn't discuss manufacturing partners.

The grand-opening shirts and their minimalist design hark to the first of Apple's more than 300 stores, which launched in McLean, Va., and Glendale, Calif., over a decade ago. Most are black with white lettering. But Apple sometimes marks major new openings with a special design or color, such as red for this year's Hong Kong debut.

For the Grand Central store, a 23,000-square-foot store that is one of its largest, Apple plans to distribute 4,000 black shirts with "Apple Store, Grand Central" spelled out in lettering that resembles a train arrival board.

The employee shirts have evolved, making them flashbacks on Apple's evolving brand. Over the years, digs at Microsoft Corp. printed on the tees—"Go beyond Vista…It's time to get a Mac" and "For a PC user it's not a gift. It's an intervention."—have given way to simpler wording such as "Say hello to iPhone" at the phone's 2007 launch.

Chris Watson, who worked at Apple's Genius Bar, or tech support desk, in Louisville, Ky., from 2008 to 2011, has bought dozens of store and employee shirts on eBay Inc., where used Apple shirts can go for as much as $60.

He often hunted for old styles among shirts stashed in colleagues' basements. That's where he found his favorite "old gem," a black mesh nylon shirt from around 2005 with a gray rubber tab with an Apple logo on the sleeve; he and his colleagues refer to it as Apple's "Star Trek" shirt. Others say it reminds them of the black mock turtleneck that Apple's co-founder Steve Jobs was known for wearing.

Mr. Watson, who is 31 and works at an Apple reseller, keeps 80 or so Apple tees in Rubbermaid bins in his basement. Many are still in their original wrapping, except for a few that, to his chagrin, his wife threw into the wash.

One that has eluded him: "Blah, blah, blog.", a shirt employees wore to promote the iWeb website and blog-creating software in 2006.

The grand-opening shirts are packaged with care similar to that of Apple products—tightly rolled in a white box that unfolds into one flowerlike piece. For the opening of a store at the Louvre museum in 2009, Apple packaged shirts in pyramidal boxes, an ode to the museum's large glass pyramid.

The packaging of his grand-opening shirt for a store in Philadelphia inspired Keith Hobin, a 21-year-old student at Drexel University, to partake in an "unboxing" ritual for the garment, snapping shots of the unwrapping just as Apple fans often do to show off their new gadgets.

"I followed the traditional approach," he says. "I have something everyone else doesn't have so why don't I brag a little bit."

Apple-store employees who honor the shirt-giveaway prohibition sometimes toss them in the trash or cut them into rags, employees say.

Dane Taylor, 35, says he acquired over a dozen shirts annually in his five-and-a-half years at Apple's Pentagon City store in Virginia and eventually broke the rules, which current and former employees say Apple doesn't appear to aggressively police. "I was keeping them in vacuum-sealed bags, but they were still taking up a couple shelves in my closet," says Mr. Taylor, who says he gave most of his T-shirts to immediate family members.

Mr. Taylor, a software developer, sometimes goes out wearing an employee shirt, but only with something over it. He isn't worried about getting caught breaking Apple's T-shirt rules, which he says include not wearing employee shirts outside, but about being seen by effusive Apple fans.

Once when he was in a hospital emergency-room bed wearing an Apple shirt, four health technicians poked their heads through the drapes and asked, "When is the iPad coming out?" His reaction: "C'mon, my heart is racing, I'm in the hospital."

Source: WSJ

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