The humble yet ubiquitous tee originally designed to be worn exclusively as an undergarment, has indeed come a long way. The universally popular t-shirt which is now a well-entrenched sartorial icon of the US fashion circuit has an illustrious history. In this blog we’ll try to retrace the evolutionary pathway of the tee, going back to this clothing item’s source.
Tracing the Evolution of the T-Shirt
T-Shirts are so omnipresent and all over the place nowadays that we simply do not spare a thought about them. As an everyday item of clothing t-shirts are so commonplace that many of us automatically assume that they’ve been around for ages. However to tell the truth, this popular garment piece is not even 150 years old to be precise.
The modest beginnings of the tee can be traced back to the 1890s- 1898 to be exact-during the Spanish-American War. The first advertisement for a t-shirt was published in a magazine in 1904 where Cooper Underwear Company announced the introduction of a new apparel for bachelors. Nine years later in 1913 the US Navy started declaring t-shirts as standardized undershirts.
However this unassuming casual garment had to wait for another 7 years before it got its official title-“t-shirt”. The credit for inducting the terminology “t-shirt” into the American English dictionary goes to F. Scott Fitzgerald, the legendary US novelist, scriptwriter, and short-story writer. It was Fitzgerald who used the exact expression “t-shirt’’ for the first time in his novel “This Side of Paradise”.
How Marlon Brando and James Dean Popularized the Tee
You’d find it hard to believe that the tee can be worn as an undershirt which it was originally till the first few decades of the 20th century. It was a rarity to come across someone flaunting the tee as an outer garment except the WWII veterans. Nevertheless the state of affairs changed and for good when Marlin Brando and James Dean, Hollywood icons donned t-shirts casually.
Marlon Brando put on a white tee in the movie “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1950) while James Dean followed suit in “Rebel without a Cause” (1955). These two legendary Hollywood thespians played a key role in popularizing the t-shirt as a distinct outerwear item of clothing. Slowly and gradually more and more commoners took to donning the tee as an outerwear garment till it became pervasive.
Additionally sporting a t-shirt as an outerwear was equated with endorsing a social cause or strongly supporting an antiestablishment movement. The London Fashion & Textile Museum displayed the t-shirt’s eventful history in the form of vivid graphics, imageries, and illustrations in 2021.
