Who invented tee shirts

Success stories. Services Screen printing. Order samples. Support forum. Resources Free templates. Use cases. Our inks. Mockup extension. Products Unisex shirts. Women's shirts. Face masks. All products. Policies Sitemap. Add-On Services. Request samples. Our Products. Collections Best Sellers. Brands Alternative Apparel. Add-on Services Tag Printing. Hem Tags. Foil Printing. Metallic Ink. Hang Tags. By the early 60s in America, improvements and innovations in printing technology, such as the proliferation of the silkscreen method popularised by Andy Warhol, as well as an overall surge in popularity, had firmly entrenched the graphic T-shirt in not only the fashion world, but also popular culture as a whole.

Across the pond, the story was somewhat different. In the early and mids, the T-shirt in all its iterations had yet to become popular amongst the masses in Britain.

Fashion designers like Barbara Hulanicki, however, were bent on breaking the status quo and marketing the T-shirt to fashion-conscious youth. Festival-goers today still like to wear their musical tastes on their T-shirts Credit: Alamy. Although the story begins, more or less, in the early 50s, it was in the 70s that the T-shirt truly emerged as something revolutionary.

None of this was lost on Vivienne Westwood and her then-partner in crime Malcolm Maclaren, whose T-shirts — both in terms of graphics and tailoring — effectively encapsulated the ethos of the punk movement taking place in Britain in the late 70s. Nor did veteran designer Katherine Hamnett fail to appreciate the subversive potential of three stitched-together pieces of cotton. It is, more than anything else, the subversive potential of the T-shirt and its power as a medium for expression that the exhibition at the London Fashion and Textile Museum examines.

Throughout her career, Westwood has been an activist as well as a designer Credit: Marta Lamovsek. The first inklings of the tee were seen in heavy woolen sleeveless undergarments similar to tank tops that were the daily uniform of sailors in the Royal Navy. During the s, the new technology of central heating allowed everyone that was bundled up in wool long johns in front of the fireplace to shed the heavy layers to lighter long underwear. Also around , the American Expeditionary Force was sent to France wearing those long-sleeved woolen undershirts.

After that, T-shirts remained synonymous with underwear and were pretty stagnant for a few decades, as the sleeveless A-shirt was the underwear of choice. It took the invention of Plastisol ink in the early s to catapult cotton tees from plain to mass-printed. The foolproof, durable and flexible Plastisol application method transformed printing from a skilled specialty to something the craftily-inclined could accomplish. Wrinkle-free cotton-polyester blends emerged in the mids to show that tees were no longer seen as underwear.

With all the tools in place, the nostalgic vintage T-shirts that continue to inspire today—from Coca-Cola shirts and Mickey Mouse shirts to Keith Haring art—were born.