in May We Wear Purple Fibromyalgia Awareness Shirt

Underwear Goes OuterwearWhile we had some fun with Cooper Underwear Company’s 1904 “Bachelor” promotion, it’s actually predated by the P.H. Hanes Knitting Company in 1902. Sears introduced their “Gob”-style shirt in 1938, its advertising proudly promoting: “It’s an outer shirt, it’s an overshirt.” Manufacturers were churning out this “all-purpose” shirt as it took on mass appeal. The workforce started adopting the t-shirt because of its light cotton fabric in warmer weather. In fact, cotton t-shirts were relatively inexpensive and easy to launder, ushering in even more outerwear wear. Slowly, this under-to-outer look took trend.The actual word “t-shirt” is supposed to have simply come about for its shape of the letter “t,” but who officially gets credit for coining the now-famous word “t-shirt”? Only the king of 1920s cool himself, F. Scott Fitzgerald. While the t-shape may seem a fairly obvious move for t-shirt, none of us were busy publishing This Side of Paradise or keeping Zelda out of trouble, were we? So, in famous lit form, Fitzgerald gets the credit. Merriam-Webster would add “t-shirt” to its dictionary in the 1920s. The t-shirt was officially bursting out on the scene everywhere. There was no covering up this phenomenon, anymore.

in May We Wear Purple Fibromyalgia Awareness Shirt

Rebels with a Causet-shirt women sears catalogWhile iconic heartthrobs Marlon Brando’s 1951 A Streetcar Named Desire and James Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause catapulted the t-shirt into iconic stardom, those rebels actually did have a cause. Wearing their signature undergarments as outerwear on the silver screen struck the cord. So much more than just a tee, it because a political statement. No, their cause wasn’t wanting cool cotton comfort. While t-shirts had become an almost norm, they still weren’t quite socially acceptable outerwear. The t-shirt at that time was rebellion.