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T-shirts In American History
If you were like me, a tee was a tee was a tee.
If you were like me, a tee was a tee was a tee.
99% of people in the U.S. claim to have a favorite tee.
Doesn’t seem like such a big thing. Many of us have a favorite pair of shoes or socks.
T-shirts are a different breed of clothing which you will soon discover.
The Wizard Of Oz first made design t-shirts famous in America. The producers used them to promote the film. Half of America was already wearing them when the movie was released.
T-Shirts account for important American economics. Cotton is still a huge industry in this country, particularly in the southern states. It takes six miles of yarn to make one T-shirt. An acre of cotton is enough to produce 1200 tees.
Close to 2 billion t-shirts are sold annually worldwide. Very few industries can boast those kinds of sales.
Tees are sold by the pound worldwide by the Salvation Army. It creates a huge bulk of their income.
Even politics became savvy to tees after the movie industry and the first to use them was Dewey with his slogan, “Dew-It With Dewey”.
In the 1950 play “A Streetcar Named Desire” Brando’s T-shirt and jeans were tailored to be form fitting to fully showcase his physique.
However, the word T-shirt did not been become an official word until the 1920’s when it was included in Webster’s Dictionary.
In 1977 more than 8 million dollars worth of Farrah Fawcett T-Shirts were sold when she appeared on Charlie’s Angels.
The wet t-shirt craze started after Jacqueline Bisset’s appearance in the film “The Deep” in which she is swimming underwater, then surfacing, wearing a white T-Shirt and topless bikini.
The most popular form of designer tees today are silk-screened. But digital reproductions are becoming very popular and blend into the fabric and, to me, have more of a “real” look than a decal ironed-on look, but of course, it is a matter of taste. I decided to manufacture both, as different folks like different looks.
Americans love our tee shirts. A survey done several years ago show that more than 62% of the U.S (all ages) own at least 10 tees and 18-24 demographic group owned over 10 T-shirts and 19% owned over 30 tees. So it doesn’t appear they are going out of style anytime soon.