The History of The T-shirt
Nobody knows exactly when the first T-shirt was produced, but there is documentation dating back to as early as 1913 that the US Navy adopted the crew-necked, short-sleeved, white common undershirt, to be worn under overalls to conceal sailors' chest hair.
In the beginning tshirt were definitely an undergarment. However, many working men wore a sleeveless undershirt called a "singlet," or a single-piece "union suit" almost into the 1940's. In the late 1930's Hanes, Sears, and Fruit of the Loom started to market the T-shirt. In 1934 the T-shirt received a setback, hen Clark Gable took off his dress shirt to reveal a bare torso in the movie It Happened One Night. American women liked the bare-chest look, and many men followed Gable's lead by discarding their undershirts in droves.
In 1937 undershirts were labeled "skivvies" and "jimshirts." They were only 1.5 to 2 ounces then -- significantly lighter than todays heavy weight t-shirts. Today's tshirts range from 5oz up to 8 ounces. In 1938, Sears introduced a T-shirt for only 24 cents a piece. It was called a "gob" shirt or sailor shirt and was proclaimed to be either an outer garment or an undershirt. "It's practical, correct either way."
While it is widely said that the arm had T-shirts early in the WWII, it was really the marines who first issued the Navy T-type shirt. It didn't take the Marines long to realize that white was an easy target, however, so the early white navy T-type shirts were dyed in the field with coffee grounds. Later the men were issued sage green shirts to blend in more with their surroundings.
The army didn't actually get their own navy T-type shirts until late into the war. A 1944 study from the Quartermaster of Clothing and Equipment for the Tropics shows that the army was still field-testing T-shirts and sleeveless undershirts to see which the men preferred. In the field test, the men preferred the navy T-type shirt because it had a better appearance, was more comfortable due to greater absorption under the arms. They said that it was also more comfortable when worn with backpacks, and provided greater protection from sunburn.
When the servicemen returned from the war, the shirts cam home with them -- and T-shirt were here to stay.
During World War II, the T-shirt was more for function than fashion. The early issue military shirts had a much wider neck and shorter sleeves than today's full cut tshirt. They were also a much tighter fit. The tight fitting style remained much the same from the early 1900s through the 1960s.
The late 40s saw the first printed Tshirts. The Smithsonian Institute's oldest printed shirt reads "Dew-It with Dewey" -- from New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey's 1948 presidential campaign. The T-shirt got a real boost from underwear to outerwear when Marlon Brando showed his form in a tight-fitting T-shirt the 1951 movie, A Streetcar Named Desire.
Brando again set the stage with his T-shirt and jeans rebel in a the 1954 movie The Wild One, and his cultural partner James Dean continued the look in 1955 with the classic movie Rebel without a Cause. Elvis was also making his way onto the world scene with his hip T-shirt and leather jacket.
About that time, the T-shirt style also changed a little. The neck opening became smaller, but the tight fit remained to show off a man's physique. T-shirts were still a very male piece of clothing. That's when clever marketers such as Walt Disney and Roy Rogers saw the advertising potential of printed t-shirts.
In the early 1950's such innovators as Ed Rother and Carl Smith started to screen print and airbrush shirts with car designs. Back then, the ink used was house paint and spray paint. In the later 50s most college shirts and sport shirts were decorated with cloth letters or with "flocking," a process through which thin fibers of rayon were electrostatically embedded in an adhesive printed on the shirt. This was a very slow and messy process that was just waiting to be replaced.
In 1959, a new ink called "plastisol" was invented. This ink was durable and stretchable - and brought about the birth of modern T-shirt printing. The 1960s provided the background for statement shirts, tie-dying, and freedom of speech. The British rock 'n' roll invasion and Vietnam were the perfect partners for a newfound culture, and the printed T-shirt was the perfect vehicle of choice for expression. T-shirts were sold mainly at state fairs, car shows, and special events -- but the lowly T-shirt that had been a fad in the sixties suddenly grew up in the 1970s.
The iron-on transfer made it easy to pick a design, pick a shirt, and combine the two using a household iron. The T-shirt store, as we know it, didn't exist until the early seventies. The iron-on transfer made it easy to mass-produce hundreds of different designs, and every mall and shopping center had a T-shirt shop. In the late seventies, a new photo-realistic iron-on transfer called a "litho transfer" was developed. It revolutionized the quality of the graphic images that could now be printed on tshirts. One of the earliest litho transfers was of Farrah Fawcett.
Everything changed when T-shirts became an industry in the 1980s. The great graphics craze started when artists who had shunned the t-shirt now found a new canvas. Tshirts became a new marketing vehicle and people liked tshirts.