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T-Shirt - A Versatile Piece of Clothing

Author: KathyAustin Total views: 4 Word Count: 631

The account of the initial stages of the t-shirt is as just about as long as its arm. Pretty short, you might be inclined to think, but it is quite long and interesting evolution. An evolution Charles Darwin would have been particularly fascinated in, had he been around at that time to chronicle it.

The notion of wearing underwear took off only in the early twentieth century when in 1901 the P.H. Hanes Knitting Company started the manufacture of men's underwear and the t-shirt came into existence only as an piece of underclothing stuffed away under a layer or layers of other dresses. But it was the Navy that really hastened its evolution when a piece of collarless, short sleeved dress with the silhouette of a "T" was issued to its sailors as standard equipment during World War I.

It was also the WWI that brought it out into the open when footage of news of the war showed the soldiers clad only in this piece of cloth, to overcome the hot and humid European type of weather. But as always its popularity was really established by Hollywood when it depicted it as a piece of clothing on its own rights. By the 1950s, the popularity of the t-shirt had skyrocketed when it was worn on the silver screen by Marlon Brando in "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1951) and then by James Dean in "Rebel Without a Cause" (1955). As more and more icons of the film industry began sporting it as a dress on its own rights the image of the t-shirt grew in stature.

There was no stopping it. Its subsequent progress was rapid and astonishing. People just had to wear it. Taking the nation by storm it became a national happening. Age was not a constraint. Neither was sex. Men, women, infants, teenagers and senior citizens sported it. It was considered to be cool - literally and figuratively and you were not "in" if you didn't wear one, and when it became a tool for political propaganda it reached its peak exposure. It is not surprising that the Smithsonian Institute boasts ownership of the oldest printed t-shirt on record, a shirt by the then Governor of New York, Thomas E. Dewey' during his 1948 Presidential campaign. It had the phrase "Dew-IT with Dewey" emblazoned on it.

Right from the very beginning this casual dress has been used for endorsing a variety of causes. Simple political messages, health messages etc. were what it was used to convey initially. It was used as a medium of protest during the Vietnam War. The invention, in 1950, of Plastisol, a more resilient and stretchable ink saw the shirt evolving into a more resourceful medium of just about any type of written or graphical communication.

Everything under the sun - Jokes, one-liners, graphic messages; just name it and they all would have at one time or another appeared on the simple, low-priced piece of dress shaped like a "T". The development of printing technology boosted its popularity and it became more and more graphical.

This simple and inexpensive apparel became a means of displaying opinions, jokes, one-liners, graphic messages and the like. Anything and everything printable would have at one time or another been printed on it. Further developments in printing technology only helped in increasing its overall reputation. Now that the Internet is here, customizing a t-shirt to suit one idiosyncrasies is just a matter of mouse and keyboard use.

The advent of the Internet brought customization into the realms of the design of these t-shirts. Anyone can design and wear a unique t-shirt of his own, according to his fancy. There is a saying that says that clothes make a man, but none say as much this one does. The t-shirt is a wonderful product.

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About the Author

Kathy Austin is a writer for an online gallery, Red Bubble. Red Bubble sells high-quality t-shirts, funny t-shirts , framed prints, mounted prints and more.

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