# Where did T-shirt's Come From?



## Printsome (Jul 31, 2013)

We may not see T-shirts in the Haute Couture runways, but we all wear them. Boy, girl; black, white; gay, straight; you, me and everyone in between – except, maybe, the Pope. Very few items of clothing are as versatile. One can dress them up and dress them down and if you pick the right size it will always look good on you.

This tube of fabric has become an essential garment in everyday life, but how did it get into our drawers? Have you ever wondered what’s the T-shirt’s story? Today I’ll try to shed some light on the past of this practical item.

The T-shirt’s ancestor can be traced back to the 19th century. Created in the US, it was a full body suit that was unfortunately named “Union Suit” – think of it as a scuba diver’s attire made out of cotton. Women were the first ones to wear the one-piece as underwear, then men quickly adopted it too.










As you can imagine, wearing a full-body piece underneath clothes is not overly comfortable so, unsurprisingly, someone at some point finally said “enough” and cut the garment in half, giving birth to the T-shirt we know and love today.

Thanks to the fact that they were cheap and easy to clean they became popular quickly. The first people to wear the T-shirt on the outside were farmers, construction workers and soldiers – people who had to do hard labour in the open field. Since the social norm required them to cover their torsos, the T-shirt seemed like a good compromise because it allowed them to stay fresh and “proper” at the same time.

Still, it didn’t really reach the general public until Marlon Brandon showcased his acting skills (and biceps) wearing a tight white T-shirt in the movie A Streetcar Named Desire. It took the power of Hollywood to make the world turn around and realise the potential the T-shirt had as an outerwear garment. The rest is history.

Every decade has had their own rendition of the T-shirt ever since. In the 60s the potential they had as canvases for cartoon characters, brands and whichever other element a marketing genius might come up with was discovered.

During the 70s fluorescent colours and dyes were all the rage (we’re still recovering from that one). And during the 80s a TV Show called Miami Vice taught us that a plain T-shirt could look dashing if you pair it up with an Armani suit.










In the 90s and the 00s, printing techniques like screen printing and direct to garment printing (DTG) have evolved non-stop, giving designers and the public in general an infinite number of possibilities to express themselves.

If you want to read my articles on the history of screen printing and DTG you can do so here and here.

So where will the future take us? There have long been talks about T-shirts used as screens and fabrics that can read our body stats. Only time will tell, but in the mean time, let’s speculate: what do you think the T-Shirt of the future will look like?


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## proworlded (Oct 3, 2006)

Here's an article that dates the 't shirt' back to the 1920's: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/magazine/who-made-that-t-shirt.html?_r=0

In 1904, the Cooper Underwear Company ran a magazine ad announcing a new product for bachelors. In the “before” photo, a man averts his eyes from the camera as if embarrassed; he has lost all the buttons on his undershirt and has safety-pinned its flaps together. In the “after” photo, a virile gentleman sports a handlebar mustache, smokes a cigar and wears a “bachelor undershirt” stretchy enough to be pulled over the head. “No safety pins — no buttons — no needle — no thread,” ran the slogan aimed at men with no wives and no sewing skills. Someone in the U.S. Navy must have seen the logic in this, because the following year, the quartermaster’s office specified that sailors should wear undershirts with no buttons under their uniforms; soon thousands of men became acquainted with the comfort of the cotton pullover.
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Though the Cooper Underwear Company popularized the crew-neck shirt, they did not invent the style. The shirts evolved out of the long johns that men wore in the 19th century, when a number of garment makers experimented with methods that would allow the fabric to stretch over the head and then snap back into shape.

In the 1890s, the cotton pullover still looked like underwear to most people and wearing it in public was considered scandalous. Lawmakers in Havana went so far as to ban the public display of any underwearlike top, and so laborers had to toil in the heat wearing long-sleeve shirts with buttons.

But gradually, the crew-neck caught on. In 1920, the garment was reborn under another name, thanks partly to F. Scott Fitzgerald. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the author was the first to use the word “T-shirt” in print; it appears in the novel “This Side of Paradise,” in a list of accouterments that a character carries with him to boarding school. Fitzgerald seems to have assumed that the idea of a “T-shirt” (so named, presumably, because of the shirt’s shape) would be familiar to readers and that they would associate it with the “white-flannelled, bareheaded youths” of New England prep schools.

By the 1940s, T-shirts had become ubiquitous in high schools. A newspaper columnist named Nancy Pepper wrote that teenagers owned closets full of T-shirts and customized them with sew-on patches and fringe. She reported that some high-school boys even used their T-shirts to advertise that they were available for make-out sessions; around the necklines of their shirts, the boys inscribed the words, “Neck here.”

ZZ TOPS

Jacques Van Gool is the owner of Backstage Auctions, an online auction house that specializes in rock memorabilia.

Do you sell a lot of T-shirts? Yes, T-shirts have become legitimate collectors’ items. I’ll never forget when Jennifer Aniston put on an MC5 shirt.

Did you suddenly see a jump in sales or auction prices when that happened? Absolutely. Keep in mind, it’s not unusual to see a 1970s shirt for as little as $25. But you also find them for $1,000. Some of the most desirable shirts to collect are shirts that were exclusively made by the promoter for the staff that was working a specific concert. Let’s say the Academy of Music in New York in 1974 had a show with Alice Cooper and the promoter printed up 30 shirts just for the staff. Obviously that shirt is valuable.

What is the most you’ve ever got for a T-shirt? Around $1,500. That was an original Fillmore West shirt that was worn by a band member of Frank Zappa. And it came with unquestionable provenance because he’s wearing the shirt on one of Frank Zappa’s albums.

I assume you collect a few of your own. I have a ZZ Top 1975 crew shirt that I love.

Is it valuable to you because of the memories? That shirt specifically? No. I bought it as part of a collection. As for the shirts with memories for me, I have old Kiss T-shirts that I’m partial to, because Kiss was the band that got me into collecting back in the ’70s.

Anything else we should know about T-shirt collecting? I am fascinated by how we have supersized our society. A large T-shirt in 1970 seems really small now. Everybody was skinny, and shirts were tight back then. The garment industry has changed the sizes almost every 10 years. The shirts are wider and longer now. When we do our auctions, we always make sure that we specify the dimensions. You measure a shirt from pit to pit and from the top of the collar to the bottom. And we have to let our customers know the true size, because they could buy a large and end up with something tiny.


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## proworlded (Oct 3, 2006)

Sorry about that link. Try this one: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/magazine/who-made-that-t-shirt.html?_r=0


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## mbrjv11 (Nov 20, 2013)

That's a really long journey from 1920 till 2013 --- Almost a century has passed and I still believe that this World would have been a pathetic place without t-shirts.
I wonder if any other dress accessory would have been able to replace t-shirts!!!


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## stphnwinslow (Sep 20, 2010)

A history of t shirts with no mention of Ed "Big Daddy" Roth?


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## Citizen Jim (Oct 27, 2013)

Hello everyone, although I am relatively new to the T-Shirt Forums, I thought I would add what I have learned about the history of the T-shirt. Around the early 1900's the U.S. Navy specified that sailors should wear 'undershirts' with no buttons underneath their uniforms. This eventually become the T-shirt. During WWII, the U.S. Army was the first to put text on T-Shirts.
Citizen Jim


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