Round neck, polo neck, V or U neck, the summery t-shirt is everyone’s favourite. Wear it in layers or as a singlet – the simple undergarment that it was when Yankie troops discovered European soldiers sporting it as a comfortable wear during a World War torn warm summer. The Americans discarded their woolly uniform and adopted the T, so much so that the 1920s saw the word ‘t-shirt’ incorporated in the Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary.
Then there is “The British Story” propounded by Harold Lipson, a retired senior vice president of Champion Products. Lipson has it that when royalty came a calling (perhaps Queen Victoria 1819-1901) the singlet worn by sailors in the Royal Navy was not considered fit for royalty as it revealed hirsute underarms! The sleeveless undergarment was soon ordered to have sleeves stitched on to it.
Another story I managed to cull from the worldwide web has it that the tee evolved with changing lifestyles. Vincent Minetti, a fashion expert with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, feels that lighter underwear coincided with the appearance of central heat. “Generally, people dress to be comfortable,” he said. “When houses were cold and drafty, and the only source of heat was the fireplace, they wore long, heavy underwear to keep warm. When houses became more comfortable, people got out of their long johns.” In that chilly period before the furnace, the undergarment of choice was the union suit, a button-front, drop-seat affair which reached from neck to knees. It came in either cotton or wool and, each year, the transition from summer to winter was marked by millions of US men as they got into their “woolies.” Women wore similar garments.
The union suit was, until well after World War I, the chief product of Union Underwear, Bowling Green, Ky., and the item from which the firm took its name. But Everett Moore, retired chairman of the board at Union, said the union suit’s popularity began to trail off in the 1920s. “A lot of young people just didn't like it,” he said. “In earlier years, they wouldn’t have had any choice, but the light knits were beginning to show up and people were wearing separate undershirts and undershorts.”
Union, according to Moore, began manufacturing undershorts in 1932, thus providing something of a landmark by which to date the abandonment of the union suit.
Ingrid Mendelsohn, a researcher with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, ascertains the WW-I story that the transition from heavy to light underwear began during World War I. The American Expeditionary Force was sent to France in 1917, she elaborates, wearing long-sleeved wool undershirts. However, said Mendelsohn, more than a few doughboys shed their regulation undergarments “over there” and came home in the French military’s light, knit-cotton undershirts. These shirts were still sleeveless, however.
Minetti repeated this story, although maintaining that, even after the Great War, US underwear was still a far cry from today’s t-shirt. “Underwear was still long and it wasn’t even all cotton," he said. In any case, the t-shirt had appeared in more or less its present form by the early 1930s. It wasn’t too long after this that people began to print on them.
Lipson at Champion noted that his company sold its first order of printed t-shirts to an Ann Arbor, Mich., sport shop in 1933. Those shirts, printed with University of Michigan designs, may or may not have been the first printed T’s, but Lipson believes they were the beginning of the retail market. “Sweaters were our primary business then,” recalled Lipson. “We flocked them with the names of different colleges and they used them for their athletic teams and so forth. “The store in Ann Arbor was the first place to just stock a printed garment and sell it to people off the street.”
As with Champion’s sweaters, the t-shirts were also flocked, Lipson said. The company was not then equipped to print with any other method, he explained, adding that t-shirts were probably chosen for retail because they were cheap and, thus, less of a risk for shop owners unsure of this new market. As the market grew, however, Champion shifted to screen printing.
Also in the ’30s, someone began to have bright ideas about the t-shirt as an advertising and souvenir item. In fact, Mendelsohn noted that the Wizard of Oz t-shirt, a byproduct of the 1939 film, is highly valued by collectors today. According to Moore and others, the most popular undershirt in the 1930s was the sleeveless A-shirt, or tank top. Its popularity, however, was short-lived. Blame Clark Gable for that. He helped strangle undershirt sales when he took off his dress shirt in the 1934 film, It Happened One Night to reveal only skin.
Sales of the A-shirt never did pick up again with young men, said Moore, noting that it took another war to get them to change their underwear habits. In 1942, the US Navy delivered specifications for the t-shirt to each of its underwear suppliers, thus ensuring that each of the hundreds of thousands of men who served aboard ship in World War II would become intimately familiar with this garment before they again saw civilian life. In addition, some evidence exists that military personnel, even at this early date, were receptive to the idea of printed undershirts.
The marketing efforts of Champion, according to Lipson, found a market for t-shirts imprinted with the names of the various military camps. The shirts were, he explained, stocked at the camps’ post exchanges (PX). Lipson theorised that the printed t-shirt may have been carried into the armed forces by men who picked up the custom on college campuses.
After the war, men kept wearing t-shirts, although most were blank. Moreover, according to Mendelsohn, civilian society wasn’t as receptive to the garment as outerwear as the military had been. The t-shirt went out of sight back under dress shirts until 1951, when Marlon Brando helped spruce up its image.
During this period, kids apparently had all the fun. Davy Crockett and Roy Rogers were the heroes in the late 1940s and child-size t-shirts were printed with the likenesses of both. Champion was an early licensee for the Roy Rogers theme and Allison Manufacturing bought the rights to produce a pint-size Joe Dimaggio shirt in 1947.
Because people at this time did not view t-shirts worn alone as appropriate adult garb, they even used their children as political billboards. According to Mendelsohn, the earliest t-shirt in the Smithsonian collection is a “Dew It With Dewey” shirt printed for the 1948 Truman-Dewey presidential race. Later shirts supported Dwight Eisenhower (1952), John F Kennedy (1960) and Lyndon Johnson (1964). All, Mendelsohn said, are in child’s sizes.
Brando helped carry the craze to adults when he played the role of Stanley Kowalski, in his undershirt, in the 1951 film A Streetcar Named Desire. Essentially, he started a craze among young people and trend-followers, not among older, more established types.
The Fifties actually saw the tee shock Americans when Hollywood icons like John Wayne, Brando, James Dean sported it as stylish outerwear. Dean made the tee a symbol of rebellious youth in Rebel Without a Cause.
The necessary tinkering needed to develop the public’s appetite for t-shirts came about in the mid and late Fifties as people learnt to print the tees. However, this printing on tees dates back to much before this time. History hasn’t recorded how the Atlantics of Brooklyn had their uniforms imprinted, and the surviving photograph of the team is of too poor quality to tell. Apparently, however, the custom of imprinted uniforms was not immediately picked up when baseball moved into its professional phase.
According to Bill Guilfoile, a public relations director for the National Baseball Hall of Fame, the first professional team to have its uniforms printed was the Cleveland Indians which, in 1916, pinned cloth numerals to its players shirts. The experiment was dropped after one game, said Guilfoile. It wasn’t until 1929 that the New York Yankees had felt letters and numerals sewn on their jerseys for good.
The t-shirt boom dates to as late as 1975 when more than 200,000 t-shirts were printed to promote the film Jaws. The following year Factors came out with its Farrah Fawcett series, which sold “in the millions.”
A less noticeable development was the introduction of cotton-polyester blends in t-shirts in the mid-1960s. T-shirts had previously been all cotton, but the industry’s touting of polyester’s wrinkle-free characteristics was its way of acknowledging that the tee was no longer just underwear.
Ironically, the acceptance of the printed t-shirt virtually killed the undershirt business. The current image of the t-shirt as an outwear item and a fashion item is now so firmly established that it almost cannot be sold as underwear.
According to The T-Shirt Book by noted screenprinting industry expert Scott Fresener, the beginning of the t-shirt is credited to the navy.
Advances in knitting, printing and dyeing allowed more variety and the tank top, muscle shirt, scoop neck, v-neck, and many other variations of the t-shirt came in to fashion. In 1965, Budweiser began to market t-shirts with their logo on them and the logo t-shirt was born.
It was the swingin’ Sixties and the flower power Seventies that saw the tee make a cool, fashionable statement. Printed, dyed, block-printed, graffiti it assumed myriad hues. Rock stars, pop bands all sported tees in psychedelic prints. Soon it even became an easy mode of advertisement. Music bands rolled out t-shirts to be sold as souvenirs and in current times the tee is the badge of your company or your cricket or hockey team, the story board for a cheeky line, a palette to paint your favourite Jim Morrison portrait or just an attitude signifying a casual lifestyle. In the current scenario, it wouldn’t be wrong to place a wager that there’d be nary a wardrobe that stacks not a single tee, be it that of a man, woman or child.
