The American fashion industry, which owes much of its early development to the Hollywood film business, is focused heavily on image making and mass market appeal. Nowhere is the affiliation between film and fashion more evident than in the promotional use of t-shirts. As early as 1939, graphics were printed on t-shirts to support the release of the movie The Wizard of Oz. And while t-shirts were not the first garments to bear script—that honor goes to designer Sonia Delaunay’s embroidered poem dresses—their simple construction and easy-wear/easy-care nature make them ideal message carriers.

American ready-to-wear, which was forced to create its own aesthetic following the occupation of Paris, has perfected the relaxed-yet-pretty, unencumbered silhouette, built through a continuous offering of casual mix-and-match articles fashioned of unsophisticated materials. The t-shirt which blends well with denim, jersey, khaki and other straightforward fabrics, harkens to America’s pioneer roots in its simplicity, practicality, and diversity, thus forming the basis for a style of dress described by costume designer, Patricia Field, as American simple or basic.

Fashion editor, Anna Piaggi, believes that “clothes change people, but people also change clothes through their character, body shape, (and) their willingness to appear more natural.” Each generation imprints it’s personality on the culture, developing unique markers, most notably in speech and dress. A study of the progression of t-shirt design provides exceptional insight into both.

You won’t find fashion layouts of models in t-shirts until very late in the 20th century, despite the fact that American sailors were already wearing a form of t-shirt underneath their uniforms in 1913. The word appeared in dictionaries as early as the 1920s, but even though tees were glamorized by celebrities like James Dean and the young Marlon Brando, they were considered counter-cultural well into the 1950s.

The phenomenon of t-shirts as wearable art began in the 1960s with the protest generation wearing what was previously considered underwear, as outerwear. While beatnik society of the previous decade had adopted black undershirts as part of their sub-culture uniform, the trend toward t-shirts as everyday garb coincided with the emergence, for the first time, of the teenage cohort as a distinct consumer group. With the development of screen-printing and knitwear imprinted designs, post-war baby boomers in slogan-emblazoned tees shocked the establishment by turning themselves into walking billboards for their political views, and advertisements for their favorite rock bands. This affluent group, some 70 million strong in the US alone, revolutionized fashion with their adoption of what soon became a unisex item of apparel.

Mass marketing, branding, and the designer phenomenon has had such an impact on Western culture that people of all ages are willing to act as human billboards, wearing t-shirts that carry identifiable logos, brands, and designer labels emblazoned boldly on the garment.