Style
Underwear as outerwear is not as new an idea as we might think,
according to Alice Harris's The White T (HarperCollins, $45), a glossy
coffee-table tome that traces the history of the T-shirt. Originally
designed as part of sailors' uniforms in the 1800s, T-shirts came out
from under after 12 million World War II sailors returned from the
Pacific and saw no reason to give up their comfort and convenience, says
Walter Wood, a Carrollton, Georgia, psychologist and fashion trend
researcher.
By the middle of the ultraconformist fifties, everybody was wearing
them. "They were worn to show affiliation," Wood explains. Jocks wore the
T-shirts of their athletic teams, brainy kids wore college T's, and the
James Dean crowd sported plain white ones with a sleeve rolled up around
a pack of cigarettes.
Then in the late sixties, when hippies decided to do their own
thing, "it was only logical that the T-shirt would extend from
affiliation to self-expression," Wood says. "The slogans that signaled
group identity began to signal self-identity." T-shirts became wearable
political protest placards, rock 'n' roll tribal garb, and later,
vehicles for expressing feelings--even those you didn't really want to
know. (Remember the "I'm with Stupid" T-shirts of the seventies?)
More recently, this simple garment has taken another turn. With
baby boomers having become the establishment and sixties protest songs
heaving become advertising jingles, I self-expressive and political
T-shirts have also been co-opted by the fashion elite. Designer Anna Sui
sells "Free Tibet" T's in her Soho boutique, and Calvin Klein echoes Ram
Dass's "Be Here Now" message with promotional T-shirts (and a fragrance)
that tell us to just "be." The T-shirt, once the social leveler, is now
part of the uniform of the fashion-conscious. And, despite Giorgio
Armani's insistence in The White T that this garment "cancels the
distinctions of caste," he'd probably argue that his T-shirts, which sell
for around $50, are head and shoulders above The Gap's $15 T's, not to
mention the classic Fruit of the Loom variety, which sells for
$2.49.
Harris readily concedes that not all T-shirts are created equal.
"On designer models, the cotton is better, the neck is better, and the
arms are different," she says. So maybe what's happening is not just a
relaxing of clothing standards, but a class system emerging in the world
of T-shirts. However, just as Levi's 501 jeans survived the
Vanderbilt-Jordache era, the plain ol' cotton T transcends trendiness,
and we'll probably be wearing it for centuries. to come.
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Since Marlon Brando's 1951 movie role as
Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Wiliams's A Streetcar Named Desire,
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): the T-shirt has stood the test of
time--transcending race, gender, and status.
Edited by Peter Doskoch
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