A T-Shirt History

A T-Shirt History: From Underwear to Outerwear

By Mark E. Dixon, Associate Editor

When tracing the history of imprinted sportswear, the first issue is: Which came first? The imprinting? Or the sportswear?

As with chickens and eggs, the dilemma is not resolved. People have been both wearing clothes and drawing pictures for a considerably long time.

Mesa, Ariz., screen printer / airbrusher Spider likes to tell the (possibly apocryphal) story of the Chinese merchant who, about 2500 B.C., combined the even-then old art of stenciling and then-current rage at the Emperor's court -- decorated robes -- to produce an early printed garment.

"I'm not sure where that story comes from," said Spider, "but even today I can see that old Chinaman's reasoning: There was a big market for a printed garment and it was faster and cheaper to stencil it than to paint it by hand."

Those who insist that sportswear is the critical ingredient in this industry, though, may prefer to trace its history to the mid-19th Century when trendy young gentlemen's "base ball" clubs began to appear in marked garments. The date of this development is uncertain, although an old photograph in the collection of the National Baseball Hall of Game, Cooperstown, N.Y., shows that the Atlantics of Brooklyn wore emblems of crossed baseball bats when the beat the New York Excelsiors in 1860.

(Like many sportswear consumers of today, the Atlantics liked their accessories flashy. Their printed shirts were complemented by the ballooning, bright red pants which marked many volunteer soldiers as inviting targets for Confederate sharpshooters at the Battle of Bull Run the following year.)

For really hard cases, who insist that there is no imprinted sportswear without the T-shirt, the story probably begins more recently, although no less obscurely.

There is, for instance, "The British Story," of which Harold Lipson, a retired senior vice president of Champion Products, Rochester, N.Y., is a proponent.

According to Lipson, sailors in the Royal Navy before the turn of the century wore a sleeveless undergarment similar to today's tank top, but made of a heavy, woolen fabric. This was considered the daily uniform for shipboard duties, he said, with dress uniforms being saved for special occasions.

That changed, said Lipson, late in the reign of Queen Victoria (1819-1901) when a member of royalty -- perhaps the queen herself -- was scheduled to inspect the fleet.

"The brass apparently looked at their men and decided that sweaty, hairy underarms were not a fit sight for royalty," he explained. "They ordered the men to sew sleeves on their underwear."

Other explanations for the appearance of the T-shirt are less complete. Indeed, several researchers suggest that the garment just spontaneously evolved during the 1920s, a product of changing habits and advancing technology. For instance, Vincent Minetti, a fashion expert with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, noted that the appearance of lighter underwear coincided with the appearance of central heat.

"Generally, people dress to be comfortable," he said. "When houses were cold and drafty, and the only source of heat was the fireplace, they wore long, heavy underwear to keep warm. When houses became more comfortable, people got out of their long johns."

In that chilly period before the furnace, the undergarment of choice was the union suit, a button-front, drop-seat affair which reached from neck to knees. It came in either cotton or wool and, each year, the transition from summer to winter was marked by millions of U.S. men as they got into their "woolies." Women wore similar garments.

The union suit was, until well after World War I, the chief product of Union Underwear, Bowling Green, Ky., and the item from which the firm took its name. But Everett Moore, retired chairman of the board at Union, said the union suit's popularity began to trail off in the 1920s.

"A lot of young people just didn't like it," he said. "In earlier years, they wouldn't have had any choice, but the light knits were beginning to show up and people were wearing separate undershirts and undershorts."

Union, said Moore, began manufacturing undershirts in 1932, thus providing something of a landmark by which to date the abandonment of the union suit.

Ingrid Mendelsohn, a researcher with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, contends that the transition from heavy to light underwear began during World War I. The American Expeditionary Force was sent to France in 1917, she noted, wearing long-sleeved wool undershirts. However, said Mendelsohn, more than a few doughboys shed their regulation undergarments "over there" and came home in the French military's light, knit-cotton undershirts. These shirts were still sleeveless, however.

Minetti repeated this story, although maintaining that, even after the Great War, U.S. underwear was still a far cry from today's T-shirt.

"Underwear was still long and it wasn't even all cotton," he said. "Some of what the A.E.F. brought home was silk. The thing the boys really took to in France was the lightness and comfort."

In any case, the T-shirt had appeared -- in more or less its present form -- by the early 1930s. And no sooner did that happen than various people began to print on them.

Lipson at Champion noted that his company sold its first order of printed T-shirts to an Ann Arbor, Mich., sport shop in 1933. Those shirts, printed with University of Michigan designs, may or may not have been the first printed T's, but Lipson believes they were the beginning of the retail market.

"Sweaters were our primary business then," recalled Lipson. "We flocked them with the names of different colleges and they used them for their athletic teams and so forth.

"The store in Ann Arbor was the first place to just stock a printed garment and sell it to people off the street."

As with Champion's sweaters, the T-shirts were also flocked, Lipson said. The company was not then equipped to print with any other method, he explained, adding that T-shirts were probably chosen for retail because they were cheap and, thus, less of a risk for shop owners unsure of this new market. As the market grew, however, Champion shifted to screen printing, said Lipson.

Also in the '30s, someone began to have bright ideas about the T-shirt as an advertising and souvenir item. In fact, Mendelsohn noted that the "Wizard of Oz" T-shirt -- a byproduct of the 1939 film -- is highly valued by collectors today.

Still, printed T-shirts -- in fact, T-shirts in general -- were apparently still too novel for the general public. Off campus, they were just underwear, and not even the most popular type of underwear.

According to Moore and others, the most popular undershirt in the 1930s was the sleeveless A-shirt, or tank top. Its popularity, however, was short-lived. Blame Clark Gable for that.

Gable did for undershirts what the late President John F. Kennedy did for hats. Like Kennedy, who appeared bareheaded at his 1961 inauguration and thus put hat sales into a nosedive, Gable helped strangle undershirt sales when he took off his dress shirt in the 1934 film, "It Happened One Night," to reveal only...skin.

Sales of the A-shirt never did pick up again with young men, said Moore, noting that it took another war to get them to change their underwear habits. (Ironically, it took another actor to bring undershirts out into the open, but more on that later.)

In 1942, the U.S. Navy delivered specifications for the T-shirt to each of its underwear suppliers, thus insuring that each of the hundreds of thousands of men who served aboard ship in World War II would become intimately familiar with this garment before they again saw civilian life.

"I'm not sure why the Navy specified the T-shirt," said Clarence Abernathy, vice president of marketing for Russell Corp.'s knit apparel division. "Maybe it was just the fact that it was a snow-white garment and it looked crisp and clean."

Abernathy noted that the T-shirt was subsequently picked up by other branches of the service and that men in each developed the habit of using T's as work garments.

In addition, some evidence exists that military personnel, even at this early date, were receptive to the idea of printed undershirts.

John H. Neal, for instance, acquired his first printed T-shirt in about 1944 while stationed in New Guinea with the 511th parachute Infantry Regiment, 11th Airborne Division. Neal, now executive vice president of marketing for Stedman Corp., brought the shirt from a comrade who had established his own T-shirt printing business in the jungle.

"A member of my company created a design and printed the shirt, probably using a stencil, and sold them to fellow troopers," said Neal. The Stedman executive did not recall the shirt's price, but noted it was more popular than the trinkets which Australian soldiers were making out of spent cartridge casings.

"He definitely had a lock on the printed T-shirt market in that area of the South Pacific," said Neal, who wore his shirt through the rest of the war and again during the Korean War. He still has it in his collection of memorabilia.

More organized were the marketing efforts of Champion which, according to Lipson, found a market for T-shirts imprinted with the names of the various military camps. The shirts were, he explained, stocked at the camps' post exchanges (PX). Lipson theorized that the printed T-shirt may have been carried into the armed forces by men who picked up the custom on college campuses.

After the war, men kept wearing T-shirts, although most were blank. Moreover, according to Mendelsohn, civilian society wasn't as receptive to the garment as outerwear as the military had been. The T-shirt went out of sight -- back under dress shirts -- until 1951, when Marlon Brando helped spruce up its image.

During this period, kids apparently had all the fun. Davy Crockett and Roy Rogers were the heroes in the late 1940s and child-size T-shirts were printed with the likenesses of both. Champion was an early licensee for the Roy Rogers theme and Allison Manufacturing bought the rights to produce a pint-size Joe Dimaggio shirt in 1947.

Because people at this time did not view T-shirts worn alone as appropriate adult garb, they even used their children as political billboards. According to Mendelsohn, the earliest T-shirt in the Smithsonian collection is a "Dew It With Dewey" shirt printed for the 1948 Truman-Dewey presidential race. Later shirts supported Dwight Eisenhower (1952), John F. Kennedy (1960) and Lyndon Johnson (1964). All, Mendelsohn said, are in child's sizes.

Brando helped carry the craze to adults when he played the role of Stanley Kowalski -- in his undershirt -- in the 1951 film, "A Streetcar Named Desire." Essentially, he started a craze among young people and trend-followers, not among older, more established types. According to one industry observer, these early T-shirt wearers may have been the same sort who today wear ripped sweat shirts and dye their hair purple.

No matter: The T-shirt was on the loose.

For a while, however, it was on the loose by itself. The technology of textile printing was, by today's standards, rudimentary even among the few major manufacturers. Custom printing in small quantities -- the primary offering of the T-shirt shop -- didn't exist.

Clearly, some tinkering was necessary before the public's undeveloped appetite for printed apparel could be whetted. The necessary developments came in the mid- and late-1950s. But, first, let's backtrack a bit.

History hasn't recorded how the Atlantics of Brooklyn had their uniforms imprinted, and the surviving photograph of the team is of too poor quality to tell. Apparently, however, the custom of imprinted uniforms was not immediately picked up when baseball moved into its professional phase.

According to Bill Guilfoile, public relations director for the National Baseball Hall of Fame, the first professional team to have its uniforms printed was the Cleveland Indians which, in 1916, pinned cloth numerals to its players shirts. The experiment was dropped after one game, said Guilfoile. It wasn't until 1929 that the New York Yankees had felt letters and numerals sewn on their jerseys for good.

However, neither felt nor tackle twill -- the more advanced type of sewn lettering which succeeded it -- are suitable for casual wear. Felt grays at the edges, tackle twill puckers and both tend to rip lose, according to Ray Gluss III, a partner in Raysons Sports of Chicago, a launderer of athletic uniforms for many professional teams.

"They both need a lot of maintenance," said Gluss. "Tackle twill, for instance really needs to be ironed to look its best. Most people wouldn't put that type of work into a T-shirt."

Surprisingly, though, garments have been imprinted with transfers since at least the 1800s. The Kaumagraph Co. of Wilmington, Del., began producing transfers on the "hot melt" rotogravure process in 1902, according to Dick Hobart, vice president of marketing for the firm. He explained that the process, which was imported from England, involves the use of pigment in a waxy substrate which literally melts when heated.

Hobart said that hot melt was and still is widely used for marking such items as Army blankets and tennis balls. In addition, he added, local fair operators used the transfers as novelties during the 1930s and '40s, marking children's shirts for s small fee.

"The big drawback was that it wasn't completely opaque," said Hobart. "It will mark a wide variety of substrates and it goes on fast, but it just doesn't cover completely. For many uses, that doesn't matter, but it does for apparel."

He added that the waxy substrate never cured, but only cooled and dried. If heated, as apparel is when laundered, the design would run or smear.

Fortunately, destiny found other means of starting the T-shirt revolution.

Several industry old-timers, among them Spider and Ed Roth (creator of the "Rat Fink" character), trace the beginning of on-demand, individualized printing to the drag-racing culture which was widespread in the 1950s.

"Everybody was really into their cars in those days," said Roth, now the head of a California amusement park's in-house printing division. "A lot of people were painting dragons and flames and pinstripes on their dragsters and, eventually, they carried that over to their T-shirts."

Spider agreed, noting that he painted his first T-shirt in high school in 1956, using the same brush and oil-based enamel which he was then using to decorate auto bodies. "In retrospect, it was terrible," he said. "The paint soaked through and pulled and sagged. Fortunately, I came across the airbrush."

Roth's beginnings were similar. He was pinstriping cars for a Southgate, Calif., body shop when a fellow came in one day in 1961 and asked him to draw a picture of his car on his T-shirt. Roth obliged, with a felt tip marker.

Other customers followed and, after a couple of months, he was so bogged down that he got out of auto work completely, bought an airbrush and converted a stall in the shop for his work. From then on, Roth's business was T-shirts.

Because he was tall (6 feet, 4 inches) and heavy (more than 300 pounds), Roth took the nickname "Big Daddy." In the early '60s, Ed "Big Daddy" Roth's caricatures of monsters and rats were so popular that one company even reproduced several in plastic models. And, still in the business, Roth today sells T-shirts by mail order, as well as videotaped lectures on screen printing and airbrushing.

Neither Roth nor Spider claim to have invented the airbrushed T-shirt, however.

"Several people were really big for awhile," said Spider. "There was a guy called 'King George' in Detroit and another who just called himself 'Mouse.'

"I think the demand and the technology just came together in several places at about the same time."

According to both men, airbrushing was wildly popular for a brief period and then faded away, supplanted by the plastisol transfer. The demise of the process, according to Spider, was hastened by hostile fire marshals, who objected to the fumes and flammability of the thinners and oil-based paints. (Now, he added, water-based paints have replaced those and airbrushing is making a comeback.)

Plastisol ink was apparently the element which made the printed garment a commercially viable product. According to Gene Krupinski, Florida branch manager for Advance Process Supply and a 49-year veteran of the screen printing industry, plastisols were introduced about 1954, probably the product of several companies working simultaneously.

"Plastisol is a lazy man's ink," said Krupinski. "It doesn't dry up in the screens, it's easy to work with and almost mistake-proof.

"What its introduction did was take screen printing out of the hands of the professionals and turn if over to the little people."

Although the technology for screen printing T-shirts was now in place, it took the appearance of the plastisol transfer to create the demand. That happened in the early 1960s.

According to Herb Wells, president of InstaGraphics, technicians for his company and International Coatings, a Cerritos, Calif., ink maker, came up with the first transfer made from plastisol inks in February 1963. There was no specific job for which the process was developed, he said, but Insta wanted a process which could be used for small runs.

Whether or not Wells is right, it was in this general period that many manufacturers of transfers went into the business. All of their products, however, were cartoon-type art; the process of incorporating a photograph with plastisol had still not been developed.

Don Boelter may deserve the credit for that. Boelter, president of Don Boelter Lithography of Hollywood, Calif., said that his firm came up with the technique in 1969 or 1970 when a local advertising agency asked its help in putting a photo of a hot dog on the front of a T-shirt.

"It was four-color process and you can't screen print that," said Boelter. "What we had to do was figure a way to do a lithograph and still get it to go on a shirt."

The shirt was to be a promotional item for the Tastee fast-food chain. (History buffs, note: It was printed front and back and cost 79 cents.) Boelter found a way, but didn't give it much more thought.

"I really didn't think much of the process," he said recently. "There weren't any T-shirt shops then, so I didn't see any potential. I was certainly not very far-sighted."

For more than a year, nothing happened. Then, Boelter's firm engineered another T-shirt advertising program. Soon after, the manufacturers of novelty transfers discovered the process.

Boelter himself dates "the T-shirt boom" to as late as 1975 when more than 200,000 T-shirts were printed to promote the film, "Jaws." The following year, of course, Factors came out with its Farrah Fawcett series, a line which sold "in the millions," according to Stacy Weidel, the company's director of marketing.

(According to Weidel, the company doesn't have a single Farrah transfer left. "Farrah herself called me about three years ago," he said, "and wanted to know where to get one because, apparently, she'd never gotten around to buying one. I sent her our last two.")

Boelter added that, also about 1975, titanium oxide was added to plastisol for the first time, thus coloring it and making it opaque. (It had previously been clear.) This allowed transfers to be used on colored shirts for the first time.

Oh, yes, the colored shirt. According to Neal of Stedman and Moore of Union, the first colored T's were pale blue and came with pickets. The bigger variety of colored T-shirts, they said, did not come until the early 1970s and was a direct result of growing demand by shirt printers and T-shirt shops.

A less noticeable development, said Neal, was the introduction of cotton-polyester blends in T-shirts in the mid-1960s. T-shirts had previously been all cotton, he said, but the industry's touting of polyester's wrinkle-free characteristics was its way of acknowledging that the T was no longer just underwear.

Ironically, Neal said, the acceptance of the printed T-shirt has virtually killed the undershirt business. The current image of the T-shirt as an outwear item and a fashion item is now so firmly established, he said, that it almost cannot be sold as underwear.

"Stedman's business used to be 100 percent underwear," said Neal. "Now, we're 20 percent underwear and all the rest is colored T's, most of them for the screen printers and various T-shirt people."

Note: This story was chosen as best of entries in an in-house contest among the publisher's 25+ magazines.

Click the thumbnail to read publisher Milton Gralla's congratulations.

Mark E. Dixon

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