Fashion

Over two billion t-shirts are sold worldwide every year. Most of them don't matter. This is about the ones that do. The t-shirt is the most democratic garment in the modern wardrobe — and arguably the least likely candidate for luxury status. Its origin story begins not on a runway or in a design studio, but in the sweltering holds of ships and the back-breaking labor of 19th-century mines and dockyards, where workers took matters into their own hands by cutting their one-piece union suits in half to survive the heat. What remained on top was a rudimentary, buttonless, crew-necked cotton shell. Simple. Functional. Invisible — because it was never meant to be seen. By 1898, during the Spanish-American War, the first manufactured t-shirt had emerged from military necessity. By 1904, the Cooper Underwear Company was marketing these tops to single men with a pitch built entirely on simplicity: no buttons, no safety pins, no needle, no thread. Just pull it on. In 1913, the U.S. Navy made it official, issuing short-sleeved white cotton undershirts as standard beneath the uniform. Sailors in tropical climates and on early submarines started stripping down to just the undershirt during work details — and the t-shirt began its long, quiet migration from beneath the uniform to the surface. F. Scott Fitzgerald gave the garment its name in print. In his 1920 novel This Side of Paradise, he listed the "t-shirt" among a college student's wardrobe essentials, and the term entered the Merriam-Webster Dictionary shortly after. But it remained, firmly, an undergarment — something worn close to the skin and hidden from polite company. The Great Depression kept it utilitarian. During the 1930s, the t-shirt became the default garment for farm and ranch work across America — the thing you reached for when modesty required covering your torso but the heat demanded you wear as little as possible. By 1938, Sears was selling them in its catalogue for twenty-four cents apiece. Then came the war — and everything changed. During World War II, the U.S. military ordered over 300 million t-shirts for its soldiers and sailors. In 1942, a printed Air Corps Gunnery School t-shirt appeared on the cover of Life magazine — the first time the garment received prominent national exposure. When veterans returned home, they wore their undershirts as casual, standalone clothing, pairing them with uniform trousers in a look that was practical, comfortable, and completely new. Hollywood made it iconic. Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire in 1951. James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause in 1955. Two performances that took the t-shirt from underwear to outerwear and from outerwear to cultural statement. The white t-shirt became a symbol of raw masculinity and youthful defiance — a garment that said more by revealing less. The 1960s turned it into a canvas. Screen-printing technology made it possible to put anything on a t-shirt — protest slogans, band logos, political art, commercial advertising. The Che Guevara portrait. The Rolling Stones tongue. Milton Glaser's "I ♥ NY." The t-shirt became the most accessible medium for personal and political expression ever created. Then Don Johnson changed the equation again. In the mid-1980s, he paired a plain white t-shirt with an Armani suit on Miami Vice and made the case — watched by millions — that a t-shirt could be dressed up. That it belonged not just under a jacket, but with one. It was the first crack in the wall between casual and formal, between the workwear origins of the garment and its luxury future. Through all of it — the Navy issuing them, Brando electrifying a generation in one, Dean making rebellion look effortless, Johnson slipping one under Armani — Sunspel was already there. Founded in 1860 in Long Eaton, England, they were among the first to manufacture t-shirts and have spent over a century refining what the garment can be. Today, their factory still runs with multi-generational artisans crafting each shirt from a proprietary two-fold Q82 fabric made with single-source Supima cotton from a single Californian farm. While the t-shirt's meaning kept changing, Sunspel kept perfecting its making. And now Orlebar Brown has reimagined it for resort life. Valentino and Dolce & Gabbana treat it as a surface for embellishment and design at price points that would have been unthinkable when Sears was selling them for less than a quarter. The t-shirt has traveled further than any other garment in the modern wardrobe. From hidden undergarment to workwear essential, from symbol of rebellion to canvas for expression, from casual staple to luxury investment — it remains, after more than a hundred years, the most versatile piece of clothing a man can own.