T-Shirt Tales

Eric K. Curtis, DDS

My pre-med biology lab partner Harry and I spent a semester together dissecting a pickled pig fetus we called Mortimer. We talked for long hours on warm Thursday afternoons as we picked through the pork for muscle attachments and narrow neurovascular bundles. Harry was a punk-rock physical anthropology major who wore a big safety pin in his cheek. Cultivating, Donald Sutherland-like, a sophisticated air of vacant detachment, Harry professed to be utterly uncaring of material goods. He kept no belongings—except a twenty-one-speed racing bicycle, of which he was particularly proud, and his collection of more than one hundred T-shirts. Harry’s punk persona required him to behave with calculated anarchical abandon from time to time, an affectation that finally brought him to grief. He was briefly expelled from school for throwing his dorm desk through a second-story window. Forced to move off-campus, he found an apartment, which for obscure reasons was soon gutted by fire. Harry was devastated. "I didn’t get my T-shirts out," he moped.

Harry felt a little piece of himself combust along with his collection. It wasn’t just that he didn’t have anything to wear anymore, but that he didn’t have anything to say. T-shirts talk. Under the guise of self-expression, they give voice to mass emotions. T-shirts are the portable billboards for our post-radical, consumer-driven zeitgeist. They advertise political slogans, social comments, jokes, logos and brand names. They offer the comfort of solidarity, or as one fashion philosopher puts it, the self-confidence and superiority of conformity. Harry’s collection, and his identity, consisted of the words and pictures on his hundred-plus Ts.

All clothes say less about protection than communication. Ironically for Harry’s unmaterialistic stance, shirts communicate nothing if not a strong spirit of ownership. In one sense, a shirt—the garment close to your heart—conveys emotional ownership. To keep your shirt on is keep your temper. To get someone’s shirt out is to cause them to lose theirs. If you don't tell your shirt, you keep a strict secret. A shirt also symbolizes literal ownership. If you lose your shirt, as Harry truly did, there goes all your stuff. When you give the shirt off your back, you offer up your last remaining possessions.

A T-shirt broadcasts its own convenient array of more subtle inclinations. As an undershirt worn on the outside, it flaunts irreverence and daring. As the uniform of youth, paired with blue jeans, it shouts insouciance. But more than anything, the T-shirt speaks to eminent flexibility. Once a tie-died banner of protest movements, nowadays the T has reached haute couture. Even Armani sells one. What the writer John Crosby observed in 1969 is still true today: "T-shirts are the going form of immortality."

The T-shirt’s immortality emerged from mortal conflict. Shortly after Pearl Harbor the U.S. Navy sent out its official specifications for an undershirt, calling it a "T-type shirt" to describe its shape, with round neck and short sleeves set at right angles to the front and back panels. Significantly, some T-shirts were soon printed with the names of military bases and divisions.

Before World War II, men’s undershirt sales were lagging. Humphrey Bogart had appeared in the 1934 film It Happened One Night without an undershirt, and the old tank-top style sleeveless undershirts everyone wore suddenly seemed unmanly. But twelve million sailors came home in 1945 and kept their T-shirts on with no apparent threat to their masculinity. Then in 1951 a skinny young Marlon Brando gave a smoldering performance in A Streetcar Named Desire. He wore a tight white T. After that, everyone else put one on too. Athletes wore the T-shirt of their athletic team. James Dean wannabes wore plain ones.

The T was tough. In his beat-generation anthem On the Road, Jack Kerouac highlighted the ne plus ultra of post-war machismo in a man he described by "his muscular neck, T-shirted in the winter night." The T was trim. In his 1957 novel Room at Top, J. Braine painted this fashion portrait of the age: "Roy...was wearing blue suede shoes, blue linen slacks, an orange T-shirt, and white sunglasses." Elvis himself, before the sideburns and sequins ate him, wore T-shirts.