The Rise of T-Shirts and the Sinkage of Humankind.
Ubiquitous and ever the faithful friend, the T-shirt is to the world as a puddle is to a rubber boot. Without whom, mankind would waltz about in nudity or stoop cloddishly under the stiffness of corsets and pestiferous coattails. T-Shirts, as we know them, however, are not as sturdy a concept as we make them out to be.
They are, in fact, a relatively recent addition to the habiliments of humankind, although have quite evidently trampled the imaginations of all fashion connoisseurs, two billion sold worldwide each year.
In the Middle Ages, a T-shaped undershirt with particularly burdensome shirttails, of which one would tuck between their legs, was a staunch indication of a well-to-do gentleman. This T-Shirt of antiquity did, indeed, erect the framework of the delectable T-Shirts to come, but were, under even the most dire of circumstances, not to be seen in public by all with an iota of sanity.
As late nineteenth century British sailors whistled their way through their homespun travail, they clad themselves in white flannel T-shirts beneath their irksome, woolen uniforms, which scowled and snarled and swallowed their laughter and joy. T-Shirts, a suitable breastplate to protect one’s conscience from the dastardly ways of plotting, scratchy coats, provoked its wearers to bequeath jaunty regards to all.
The British Royal Navy, perceiving the valor of such a vesture, permitted their troops to don such T-Shirts with a pointed absence of any despicable coats whilst laboring on-deck. The sailors, merry and gay, submitted with wondrous approbation as they skippled and skappled away.
As Time trudged listlessly along, T-Shirts wrapped society into a tighter and more intricate knot (speaking of which, nearly 56 million T-Shirts are needed to wrap fully around the Earth). During World War II, the United States issued T-Shirts to their troops, which begat an image quixotic of courage and chivalry to T-shirts for all (or to those in alliance with America, that is). By clothing their soldiers in oddly-figured tunics, the United States Military was heedlessly propagandizing the T-Shirt.
It has been said that the T-shirt was conceived as laborers heaved themselves about through arduous, sweltering toil, that after their ears peeled in strife and heat they scissored their jumpsuits in half, but this, presumably, is a legend and a myth (much like zippers).
The allure of mutineering and defying standard norms provoked the accustomed undershirt to be donned as an overshirt and an undershirt and an all-around wonder shirt. The anti-establishment intellectuals of the world began assuming T-shirts as their primary torso muffler, and the followers followed and the non conformists were bludgeoned into T-shirthood due to the inundation of T-shirts into their (and our) society.
“I don’t really put a lot of thought into what I wear, and [T-shirts are] also at the store a lot of the time, so I wear T-shirts”, says Rohan Thomas ‘26.
As people froliced about in their T-shirts, they were stricken, much like about their motorized chariots with bumper stickers, with the idea to express their ideas, opinions, puns, snide comments on society, political stances, musical preferences, bedraggled profanity, and the infinite possibilities of messages one can communicate on a belly-sized blank slate, on their T-shirts.
Thomas E. Dewey, the republican nominee of the 1944 presidential election race, is credited to have branded the first ever slogan T-shirt. “Do it with Dewey” greeted the T-Shirt-trodden passerbys of America around that time, although the advertisement’s success is rather an ambiguous one indeed. One could rightfully remark upon its failure to brainwash, seeing as President Franklin D. Roosevelt triumphed and presidented with Mr. Dewey’s advertising coming to naught. One could argue for its effectiveness as well, as Mr. Dewey’s battle to wrest the throne from President Roosevelt proved to be the nearest one managed to get in trouncing Roosevelt once and for all.
Betterment of technology through the 1960’s in silk screen printing produced a swift, inexpensive method of printing T-shirts. As the punk rock movement swept the minds of 1970’s hipsters, the wish for groovy garments ignited a twig which erupted into a gargantuan demand for printed T-shirts.
As the now-equivalent of underpants became a full-fledged draconian beast, gnawing on the apparel of all, it normalized a sense of informality and, as the jargon of present day adolescents would phrase it, “chillness”, with the upright, punctilious zeitgeist of the past a dusty memory, crooked and wheezing of bits of soot and pebbles as the present left in flailing on the side of the road.
As the bourgeois ascertained the solidness of which T-shirts had thumped society, they longed for an elite class of T-shirts of their own. And thus, Dior and Yves Saint Laurent came out with designer T-shirts in the 1970’s, Chanel, Lacoste, Calvin Klein, and Polo Ralph Lauren to follow. In the present day, it is to be expected of any companies, whether hoping to proffer sophistication or not, to sell and franchise off of T-shirts.
The term ‘T-shirt’ was not, as the world tearfully divulges, coined until F. Scott Fitzgerald exploited it in his sprawling 1920 novel, This Side of Paradise. It is primarily spelled with an uppercase ‘T’ followed by a hyphen, for a reason most likely to be interpreted by the semblance beared by both a T-shirt with its arms outstretched and the figure of an uppercase letter T (and not the lowercase one, mind you).
The time we happen to inhabit is peppered with the occasional eccentric who sports slim neckties and yellow turtlenecks and crockety umbrellas over their arm, but is predominantly populated by T-shirts. T-Shirts become their beneficiaries, and such beneficiaries become their T-Shirts. ‘Twould be a rare instance indeed for one to surge into the world and not see any T-Shirt-wearing individuals, for T-Shirts clench our society as tenaciously as our society grips our very being.
“There are probably five days in the year I don’t wear T-shirts for holidays and formal events and things like that,” says Elliott Osman ‘26.
And so, are T-Shirts the sleek, science fiction-esque uniforms we have maundered ourselves into? Do T-Shirts, of whom we allow absolute control over our whimpering wardrobes, control our desperate minds? Does the influx of T-shirts coalign with the rise of a monotonous, blank-minded people? Though we have yet to comprehend the enormity of such a grumpish garment, we may come to an understanding at a moment we deem, as one does, much too late.
