In 1904, the Cooper Underwear Company ran a magazine ad announcing a new
product for bachelors. In the “before” photo, a man averts his eyes
from the camera as if embarrassed; he has lost all the buttons on his
undershirt and has safety-pinned its flaps together. In the “after”
photo, a virile gentleman sports a handlebar mustache, smokes a cigar
and wears a “bachelor undershirt” stretchy enough to be pulled over the
head. “No safety pins — no buttons — no needle — no thread,” ran the
slogan aimed at men with no wives and no sewing skills. Someone in the
U.S. Navy must have seen the logic in this, because the following year,
the quartermaster’s office specified that sailors should wear
undershirts with no buttons under their uniforms; soon thousands of men
became acquainted with the comfort of the cotton pullover.
Though the Cooper Underwear Company popularized the crew-neck shirt,
they did not invent the style. The shirts evolved out of the long johns
that men wore in the 19th century, when a number of garment makers
experimented with methods that would allow the fabric to stretch over
the head and then snap back into shape.
In the 1890s, the cotton pullover still looked like underwear to most
people and wearing it in public was considered scandalous. Lawmakers in
Havana went so far as to ban the public display of any underwearlike
top, and so laborers had to toil in the heat wearing long-sleeve shirts
with buttons.
But gradually, the crew-neck caught on. In 1920, the garment was reborn
under another name, thanks partly to F. Scott Fitzgerald. According to
the Oxford English Dictionary, the author was the first to use the word
“T-shirt” in print; it appears in the novel “This Side of Paradise,” in a
list of accouterments that a character carries with him to boarding
school. Fitzgerald seems to have assumed that the idea of a “T-shirt”
(so named, presumably, because of the shirt’s shape) would be familiar
to readers and that they would associate it with the “white-flannelled,
bareheaded youths” of New England prep schools.
By the 1940s, T-shirts had become ubiquitous in high schools. A
newspaper columnist named Nancy Pepper wrote that teenagers owned
closets full of T-shirts and customized them with sew-on patches and
fringe. She reported that some high-school boys even used their T-shirts
to advertise that they were available for make-out sessions; around the
necklines of their shirts, the boys inscribed the words, “Neck here.”
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