In A World Where You Can Be Anything Be The Chitt Shirt

A first glimpse into T-shirt history reveals that, the T-shirt is not, as one might mistakenly think, a staple wardrobe item of knitted cotton, known and worn in every possible condition, fashion, shape and cultural form the world over. Trust me on this. You see, the T-shirt is a great deal more: It is a political statement, a pledge of allegiance, a declaration of intent, an item of propaganda, enduring cachet in the ever-changing currencies of cool, It is bragging rights, street cred and, an enduring memory fixed and framed on a bed of cotton; it is a launchpad for envy, and for peer and parental outrage, it is a billboard, it is both a warning as well as an invitation and, those are just the ones with something printed on them. The history of the humble T-shirt is far greater than the sum of its parts. Throughout T-shirt history this ubiquitous garment has been the herald of the now, and even the soon-to-be-now, it is both our papyrus and our pyramid, the cave-wall painting of our civilization. It is where we sketch our stories, declare our allegiances, our politics, and run up our flags–both friendly and fearful, it is a signpost we use to save us the trouble of telling each other what we are thinking, feeling and listening to. T

here is no other garment in the modern closet which is so ubiquitous, so multi-functional and practical, so politicized and so loved, as the basic Tee. But where did it come from and how did it get here?

In A World Where You Can Be Anything Be The Chitt Shirt

T-shirt History: A Pre-HistoryThe T-shirt as we know it does not arrive fully formed in a storm of prêt-à-porter perfected readiness. The Tee evolves out of our history with clothing and across a rocky century of upheaval, war, protest, gender-relations and practical needs. The first T-shirt, like the first humans probably emerged as a lumpy, niggly, amorphous thingamajig hardly worth commenting on, other than to point out its smell. It is draped. It is tied. It is unrefined, unkempt, unfettered, uncultured, unstructured, but most importantly–it is underneath. If you are looking for the genesis story of T-shirt history–its cottony Garden of Eden–the most likely place to find it is as the lumpy something beneath other clothing to prevent chaffing, and to encourage insulation. One layer is good, but two layers are better, and when resources are scarce multiple layers are marks of wealth, and often of status. There is little point in wearing a skein of fabric beneath say, protective armor, if you can’t afford the armor, or lack the status to wear it. In the early pre-history of undergarments the pecking order is simple, if you’ve got ‘em, you are upwardly mobile. By the sixteenth century clothing in general had become quite refined; undergarments were worn to protect and to preserve expensive outer-garments from perspiration and marks left by the skin. In T-shirt history, as the starched and stuffy Victorian era (1830s through 1900) rolled around our proto-tee is well and truly “underneath” and starts to appear as a lather strange long, beaver-tailed undershirt doing double duty for men as underwear, which was rolled up to cover the dangly mister-bits.