The iconic garment par excellence. It’s really hard to establish a real start, but let’s try to tidy up the long history of the T-shirt. 

In 1904 the Cooper Underwear Company published an advertisement in a magazine announcing the arrival of a new product made especially for bachelors, a cotton sweater.

“No safety-pins, no needles, no thread, no buttons,” was the slogan of the advertisement for those men who didn’t have a wife and weren’t really experts at sewing on it. The following year, the U.S. Navy, understanding the extraordinary versatility and comfort of the garment, implemented underwear to standard uniforms, equipping its soldiers with a buttonless cotton shirt, which should be worn right underneath the uniforms. The one advertised by the Copper Underwear Company, was a sort of crew neck tank top that was still far from the standards we are used to today, but certainly, at this stage, the first step towards modernity took place. That cotton shirt was elastic and practical, it could be stretched or “crumpled” but it always returned to its original shape. 

In the last decade of the 19th century, cotton knitwear was labeled as underwear by most people, and it was unthinkable to wear it in public, it would have been scandalous. Even the Cuban government forbade by law to wear any kind of “underwear”, so workers were forced to work wearing long-sleeved shirts with buttons, at prohibitive temperatures.

1920, however, is the year in which the chief takes the name we know today, thanks to Francis Scott Fitzgerald. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the American writer was the first to use the word “T-shirt” in the novel “The Side of Paradise“. Fitzgerald used the letter T because of the shape that the T-shirt has and also because it would be immediately recognizable by readers.

By the 1940s, tees had become a regular item in American high schools, so much so that a journalist, Nancy Pepper, wrote an article in which she explained how the closets of teenagers at the time were full of T-shirts and that they were often customized with patches or something else. She also reported that some teenagers used to write on the collar of their shirt, “neck here“, which meant that they were available for making out.

Thanks to the developments in screen printing, between the 50s and 60s, the success of the T-shirt received a significant boost, just think of the screen print depicting the face of Marilyn Monroe, made by Andy Warhol in 1962, starting from a photograph by Gene Korman used to advertise the film Niagara in 1953. 

In 1969, a key moment came. Don Price, a marketer at Rit Dye, who produced the dyes we still use today, presented the product to some creatives in Greenwich Village. They advised Rit to replace his canned powders with liquid dyes that were better for creating multi-color designs. And when he heard about Woodstock, he funded some artists to make hundreds of tie-dye t-shirts to sell during the festival. The success was gigantic, to the point of becoming a symbol of the counterculture of the time, and still today the tie-dye T-shirt is an absolute must.

Another milestone in T-shirt history dates back to 1977, when Milton Glaser revived New York‘s energetic reputation with the most successful marketing campaign of all time. He printed on t-shirts the iconic “I love NY“, which very soon became a symbol of the city, just like the Statue of Liberty.

Nowadays, the T-shirt is a cornerstone of clothing and fashion in general, all brands, including haute couture, include it in their collections, and is the basis on which many companies have built their greatness, starting from a simple white t-shirt.