RETAIL : Off the Wall:

When a big news item hits the headlines, can commemorative T-shirts be far behind?

No sooner had the wall started coming down than a San Clemente entrepreneur, Rich Principal, came out with silk-screen shirts reading “Die Berliner Mauer”-- or the Berlin Wall. The white T-shirts, which retail for $15, show a black drawing of a figure standing amid barbed wire on top of the wall and tearing it down.

The shirt “is a gesture of capitalism and kind of shows them the wall didn’t work,” said Principal, 29, a real estate marketing agent.

So far sales--by mail and in a Westwood specialty shop that caters to UCLA students--have been brisk. Principal said he has sold “a couple hundred” in about two weeks.

But don’t look for the shirts anywhere soon in Orange County. “The graphics are kind of strong and could be controversial,” Principal said. “People in L.A. are much cooler.”