T-Shirts

The T-shirt is one of the most successful consumer items in American culture. Over one billion T-shirts are purchased annually in the United States. The popularity of the T-shirt stems from its capacity to convey information and from the fact that it can be produced rapidly and cheaply. The T-shirt was one of the first types of garments to communicate both verbal and nonverbal signals. Printing on shirts as a means of identifying the wearer with an organization, such as a sports team, appeared in the mid-nineteenth century and was being used by universities in the 1930s. The use of the T-shirt to communicate other types of information began in the late 1940s, when faces and political slogans appeared on T-shirts, and, in the 1960s, with commercial logos and other designs. Technical developments in the 1950s and 1960s, such as plastic inks, plastic transfers, and spray paint, led to the use of colored designs and increased the possibilities of the T-shirt as a means of communication. The use of verbal signals on clothing, usually in the form of brand name logos, has proliferated, in part, as a result of the ubiquity of the T-shirt.

The steadily increasing popularity of the T-shirt in the twentieth century can be interpreted on the grounds that the garment is perfectly adapted to the fragmentation of lifestyles and subcultures in contemporary media culture. Because it costs so little, the T-shirt is available to consumers at all social levels. New versions can be manufactured on demand, to fit all types of occasions, from Gay Pride parades to patriotic souvenirs supporting the Gulf War or the war in Iraq. Expensive versions of the garment are profitable as status symbols for displaying upscale brand names.

The T-shirt has been used to convey both rebellion and conformity, depending on the context and the types of messages inscribed on the front or back. Unlike “closed” texts, such as men's hats and the business suit, which have fixed meanings, the T-shirt, along with jeans, is an “open” text that continually acquires new meanings as it is appropriated by different social groups and worn in different social contexts.

The variety of slogans and logos that appear on T-shirts is enormous. The T-shirt expresses social identity in many different ways, ranging from identity politics to lifestyle and leisure. Much of the time, consumers consent to being co-opted for unpaid advertising for global corporations selling clothes, music, sports, and entertainment in exchange for the social cachet of being associated with certain products. Activists use T-shirts to indicate their [Page 1484]support for social and political causes, groups, or organizations to which they have made a commitment. Occasionally, the T-shirt becomes a medium for grassroots resistance. Victims of gender-related violence, such as rape, incest, battering, and sexual harassment, have used T-shirts as venues for statements about their experiences that are exhibited on clotheslines in public plazas. By contrast, some young men use T-shirts to express hostile, aggressive, or obscene statements denigrating women or to display pictures of guns and pistols. Teens of both sexes use them as a means of expressing their cynicism about the dominant culture, particularly global advertising.

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