The modern T-shirt evolved from undergarments used in the 19th century. Initially, the one-piece union suit underwear was divided into separate top and bottom garments. These were adopted by miners and stevedores in the late 19th century as a convenient covering for hot environments. In 1913, the U.S. Navy first issued them as undergarments, specifically as a crew-necked, short-sleeved, white cotton undershirt to be worn under a uniform. Sailors and Marines in work parties, early submarines, and tropical climates often removed their uniform jacket, wearing only the undershirt.
The T-shirt became popular as a bottom layer of clothing for workers in various industries, including agriculture. Its ease of fit, cleaning, and inexpensive nature made it the shirt of choice for young boys. By the Great Depression, the T-shirt was often the default garment for farm or ranch chores. Following World War II, Navy men wore them as undergarments, and veterans gradually began wearing their uniform trousers with T-shirts as casual clothing. The shirts gained further popularity in the 1950s after Marlon Brando wore one in A Streetcar Named Desire, elevating them to fashionable, stand-alone outerwear.
In the early 1950s, companies in Miami, Florida, began decorating T-shirts with resort names and characters. Tropix Togs, founded by Sam Kantor, was the first to do so extensively. After a meeting with The Walt Disney Company in 1976, Kantor's company became the original licensee for Walt Disney characters, including Mickey Mouse and Davy Crockett. These T-shirts were sold when Walt Disney World first opened. Other companies, such as Sherry Manufacturing Company, also based in Miami, expanded into T-shirt printing, initially screen printing souvenir tourist scarves.
The 1960s saw the emergence of the ringer T-shirt, a solid-color shirt with bands of a second color around the collar and sleeve edges. This decade also brought tie-dyeing and screen printing to the basic T-shirt, transforming it into a medium for wearable art, commercial advertising, souvenir messages, and protest art. Psychedelic art poster designer Warren Dayton pioneered political and pop-culture art pieces on T-shirts. In the late 1960s, Richard Ellman, Robert Tree, Bill Kelly, and Stanley Mouse established the Monster Company in Mill Valley, California, to create fine art designs specifically for T-shirts, often featuring emblems associated with the Grateful Dead and marijuana culture. The T-shirt bearing the face of Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara also became a popular symbol from the political turmoil of the 1960s.
Since the 1960s, T-shirts have flourished as a form of personal expression. Screen printed T-shirts have been a standard marketing tool for major American consumer products like Coca-Cola and Mickey Mouse since the 1970s. They are also commonly used to commemorate events or make political or personal statements. Since the 1990s, companies of all sizes have produced T-shirts with corporate logos or messages as part of advertising campaigns. T-shirts with prominent designer-name logos, such as Calvin Klein, FUBU, Ralph Lauren, American Apparel, and The Gap, became popular, especially with teenagers and young adults, allowing them to display their taste for designer brands in an inexpensive way.
T-shirts are among the most worn garments today, with two billion T-shirts sold worldwide each year. The average person in Sweden buys nine T-shirts a year. Production processes can be environmentally intensive, with materials like cotton requiring large amounts of water and pesticides. Modern versions may have a body made from a continuously knitted tube, produced on a circular knitting machine, resulting in a torso with no side seams. The manufacture of T-shirts has become highly automated, sometimes including cutting fabric with a laser or a water jet.
Other decoration methods include heat transfer vinyl (HTV) and dye-sublimation printing. Dye-sublimation printing, also known as all-over printing, came into widespread use in the 21st century, allowing for unlimited colors and designs that are permanently dyed into the threads of the shirt, preventing fading. This method is economically viable for small-quantity printing, unlike screen printing which has higher setup costs.
This article is based solely on the supplied corpus. No external sources were consulted; claims that could not be substantiated against the corpus were omitted under the drop-the-claim rule.