The World’s Biggest T-shirt: Made in Romania!

Romania so far holds almost 50 world records, most of them on the zany side

Ana-Maria Cononovici, 21.01.2020, 14:39

We have no way of knowing what is the strangest birthday gift you ever got. What we are almost sure of that if you got a T-shirt, you would never expect it to be the worlds biggest.

However, this is precisely what happened to Cristian Radulescu last year on his birthday. Well let him tell the story of the biggest T-shirt in the world.

“This was meant as a birthday surprise. Some very good friends of mine had the idea to make it, because they asked me what I wanted for my birthday, and I said that I wanted nice memories. And the memory became palpable. Four of my friends thought about this T-shirt, and they put the idea into practice. They bought the fabric, they sewed it, and then, on my birthday, they blindfolded me, they put me on an airplane, we took off, they put a parachute on me and dropped me from the plane. I opened up the chute, and as I was going down I saw the T-shirt on the ground. It looked pretty small to me, but only because it was far away. When I landed, though, I realized it was simply huge. The shirt, with the logo Ruvix, is 100 m long and 80 m wide, which makes for 8,000 sqm. They used 2 km of thread, and they worked on it two and a half weeks cumulatively. The logo on the shirt alone is the size of a basketball court!”

Romania so far holds almost 50 world records, most of them on the zany side. Among the zaniest Romanian achievements in the Guinness Book of Records are coming up. The longest condom chain, in 2007, when 1,683 people tied end to end 25,773 condoms, making a chain 3,296.46 meters long. This was an initiative on the part of the organizers to raise youth awareness on the danger of HIV-AIDS. The longest letter to Father Christmas was written by school children from Brasov in 2008, on a paper roll 413.8 m long and 37 m wide. 2,110 school chidren between the ages of 8 and 14 wrote on it their wishes for Christmas, addressed to Santa. The longest smoked sausage was made in Bucharest also in 2008, and is 392 m long. The thin sausage was divided among people who came at the award ceremony. The biggest funeral cake was made in 2008, the traditional funerary boiled wholewheat cake weighed five tons, and was over 50 sqm. The coliva, as it is called in Romanian, was made in a military unit in Brasov, where 10 military cooks worked for 24 hours to make it. The biggest traditional round dance was held in 2009 in the town of Slatina. No less than 13,828 people from the town held the biggest hora ever on the national day, also celebrating the celebration of their hometown.

We asked Cristian Radulescu when he realized that he was dealing with a giant T-shirt:

“I was really excited! The moment I landed I didnt know how to react, I couldnt wrap my head around it. It is hard to believe you own the biggest T-shirt in the world. Our company makes and prints shirts, and now we have the biggest. It was a real shock, a very pleasant one. I went with my friends and employees, the ones who had made the shirt, and we measured it for the Guinness Book of Records, for proof. I want to emphasize that they worked on it in secret, I had no idea, it had to be a surprise. They worked for 16 days, about 8 hours a day every day. You can understand my reaction. We set aside a piece of the same fabric and made a T-shirt at a scale of 1:100. There were some 30 people who worked in shifts, continuously. Sensational!”

Previously, the record for the biggest T-shirt had been set by Brazil, in October 2014. The record was being held by an organization in Brazil, which made a shirt 92 m long and 62 m wide. It weighed no less than 4,500 kg. It was unfurled on a field in Navegantes, in the southeast of Brazil.

Cristian Radulescu talked about his plans, now that he holds this record:

“We are planning more extraordinary things, but we dont yet have our mind set on a specific thing, because the work is titanic. However, we have managed to put Romania on the map, because right now we have the world record. Right now we are business as usual, because it is hard even to store such a shirt. Think about it, when it was spread out on the ground, any gust of wind, any kind of rain would have ruined some titanic work. But we were lucky to have nice, sunny weather. In comparison, the Intercontinental hotel in downtown Bucharest is 77 m high, and our T-shirt was 100 m long, on the dot. It is one third more in length than the Intercontinental! I would like for someone else to make a bigger one, so that we ourselves can go on and make an even bigger one. That would be good motivation. I am glad that this shirt is made here, in Romania, and that we can boast about the gigantic size, and I would like to use this opportunity to thank all my friends!”

The only thing left for you to ask yourselves is: What would I like for my birthday?