Saturday, May 4, 2013

The T-Shirt.

Just the other night I watched Air America.

Okay, I didn't say that I limited myself to high brow movies. Sure, I like good movies.  And sure, people who know me have heard me complain about vapid American comedies (why anyone can stand to sit through Wayne's World or Grownups I have not a clue).  But that doesn't mean that only the really good stuff shows up on one of the two televisions around here.  Besides, I've seen, I think, darned near every movie set during the Vietnam War at some point, so when there's one I haven't seen, I have to watch it, lest I miss something.  And I like airplanes, and the film has some interesting airplanes.

Not that this thread has anything to do with Vietnam or airplanes.

Rather, this is a thread about t-shirts.

Okay, how does this make sense. Well, in the film, at one point, Morton Downey, Jr., is depicted wearing a Jimi Hendrix t-shirt.  I'm not exactly sure what year the film is set in, but it's probably roughly 1965 or so. Most of the ARVN soldiers are depicted using M1 Garands, with a few using M16s, which would be about right for that period, and the plot and other details generally fit in to the mid 1960s, rather than later in the war.  Not that this matters.  Rather, what surprised me is that Downey was wearing what appears to be a contemporary t-shirt. The film was made in 1995, and the shirt looks much more like something you'd buy at that time.  Indeed, Hendrix was such a guitar titan that he remains really popular amongst guitar aficionados today, and you can easily still find some very artsy t-shirts with Hendrix portrayed on them.  I suspect that they got the period t-shirts a bit incorrect, actually.

T-shirts themselves apparently date back to the late 19th Century, but they didn't start getting widespread civilian use by the general population until the Navy issued them during the Spanish American War.  They're another one of those clothing items that demonstrate the menswear maxim that all men's clothing original was for use in the field, or for war.  They started getting some use then, but they didn't begin to achieve the incredible dominance they now have until World War Two.

U.S. Merchant Marine, World War Two.

By World War Two the US armed forces had gone to issuing the t-shirt to everyone in every branch of the service.  Everyone received at least some "plain white t's", but combat soldiers and Marines also either were issued the dye to dye t-shirts an "olive" green color or they were actually issued some in that color. Either of the latter.  T-shirts weren't really designed to be a stand alone item for wear, but they came to be in areas or conditions that were very hot, such as in tropical areas or in the hot areas of ships.  Not quite to the extent that a person might think, however.  It was only in very hot places that you can find examples of servicemen wearing t-shirts only during World War Two.

 Michigan farmer out on the town, early 1940s.  Interesting example of how dress standards have changed.  He appears to have had a few too many, but he's still wearing a suit vest, a dress shirt, and, under that, what appears to be a "wife beater" t-shirt.  I.e., a t-shirt with no sleeves.

World War Two also, I think, saw the introduction of the t-shirt with a slogan.  I've seen, for example, photographs of U.S. airborne troops who are wearing t-shirts with the Airborne insignia, a large set of wings surrounding a parachute, on them.  And I've read that these were available in small sizes for children at the time, and that solders in airborne units bought them for their own children for for the children of people they knew. This doesn't appear to have been extremely common, but it did occur, which was all that was required to start off what would become an iconic clothing form.  Soon after the war, the practice spread to universities where athletic departments and teams started issuing t-shirts with "Property Of" printed on them. That sort of t-shirt continues on today, and you can buy "property of" t-shirts which were never "property of" anyone other than you.

World War Two had a big impact on everything, and that brought the t-shirt down into stripped down use.  After that, you'd see photos of men, but not women, wearing them in the summer.  I've seen, for example, photos of my father out on the lawn in the late 1940s wearing one.  Most were white t-shirts, however, not ones with slogans.  Slogan t-shirts were quite rare at first, save for the examples noted above.

Marlon Brando soon had an impact on this, however, oddly enough.  First of all, he wore a t-shirt in the film The Wild Ones, the classic move about post war California motorcycle gangs.  Its not the world's greatest movie, but it isn't bad either.  Brando famously war a t-shirt and leather jacket.  He followed up that look in A Streetcar Named Desire and On The Waterfront and the t-shirt as edgy wear was born.

I don't know when t-shirts with slogans came into widespread existence.. Tie Dyed t-shirts appeared as Hippie wear in the 1960s, however, and that's not far off from that.  I remember actually making tie dyed t-shirts in a YMCA summer youth camp, which might have actually been in the late 60s, or perhaps the late 70s, so they had made it even as far out as here.  When I first had a t-shirt with a slogan on it, however, I have no idea.  I'm sure I had them by the mid 1970s, however, when I was in junior high.  About this time t-shirts started being worn by girls as well, which had been quite rare prior to the 1960s, and which was only associated with some sort of sweaty work prior to that time.

By my recollection those early slogan t-shirts weren't exactly the works of art depicted in Air America. More typically they had beer logos on them, or a name brand on them.  I recall that the beer slogan ones were banned at school.  By high school, t-shirts were very common everyday wear, with many having name brands on them, or the logos of sports teams, and some just being colored (IE., not white).  The very first ones that had something that a person would regards as art didn't come in until then, but they were nothing like some of the ones that are around now.

Back in the late 70s and up through the mid 80s, I wore t-shirts routinely in the summer, and even the winter, a lot.  My father cautioned me on that, as you can really get some damaging sun exposure that way, but like most young men I ignored that.  In basic training, at Ft. Sill, we wore t-shirts as our only outwear all the time, as it was so hot, a practice that seems to have (wisely) disappeared from the Army, which now emphasizes wearing your clothing as protection from the sun.  At any rate, for whatever reason starting in the mid 1980s I found that I was pretty much cold most of the time, even often in summer, and started to abandon that.  About that time also I started to retreat to the sensible practice of the past and wear regular shirts, often with long sleeves, when working outdoors in the summer.  I'm cold anyhow, but I like the protection a longer sleeved shirt provides.  Now, I hardly ever just wear a t-shirt.  I suspect that the widespread use of t-shirts for summer wear has been a bit of a bad thing, although there's clearly no turning the clock back on that.

Funny, anyhow, how an item of very simple underwear has gone on to being nearly universal outwear.  In the early part of the 20th Century, hardly anyone ever wore an item like this as outwear.  Indeed, people wore their shirts no matter what.  Photos of soldiers serving in Mexico during the Punitive Expedition show them wearing their wool shirts in the summer. . . in Mexico.  Try as you might, it'd be almost impossible to find a photo of anyone working outdoors wearing a t-shirt until World War Two.

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