Fashion & Cosmetics Articles - T-Shirts as Advertising Media


by Robert Bell - Date: 2010-01-12 - Word Count: 803 Share This!

Slogan-festooned t-shirts have quite a history, going back to the development of the fabric they're made of. The story begins with what economists and historians call "confluence" - certain trends merging and creating new innovations without any central organizing influence. With half of Britain's early-1800s exports being cotton and textiles, the world quickly learned to support and interact with this market, enough so that there was plenty of room left for the U.S. textile industry (before, during and after the Civil War). So there's the fabric, cotton, at any rate. Now where did the t-shirt itself come from?

From America, that's where. White cotton "tee shirts," so named because of their resemblance to the letter "T," were introduced by the U.S. Navy during the First World War. They were light, cheap, quick to dry and easy to wash - comfortable, too. The t-shirt got its biggest Depression-era boost when Clark Gable scandalized moviegoers by wearing one in "It Happened One Night," and right in front of an enraptured Claudette Colbert, as a matter of fact. Through the 1930s, colored t-shirts were sold in such high-end outlets as Fifth Avenue's B. Altman department store (their newspaper ad said, "The T Shirt Becomes Respectable - Actually Smart!").

Here come the "walking ads" By the end of the Second World War, servicemen in all of America's military branches had made the t-shirt as common as shoelaces. In the early 1950s, "Life" magazine was running features about elaborate t-shirt fashion statements, such as one model woven to look like houndstooth tweed. Suddenly, with "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "Rebel Without a Cause," the t-shirt became firmly associated with Hollywood, and shortly thereafter there came to our shores another famous "confluence" - one we call "the Sixties." Tie-dying, silk-screening, and sewing or ironing on patches and other colorful gewgaws seemed to come naturally to the cotton tee.

The unofficial history that most people have heard acknowledges all these occurrences, then claims that adding slogans grew from the collegiate practice in the 1920s and 1930s of adding "Property of ABC College" on athletic wear. Some investigators of "history's mysteries" discovered, however, that a few jokesters in 1890s Chicago, and perhaps elsewhere, found a new use for the celluloid "shirt bosoms" that rotated around men's midriffs. They began adding customized messages such as, "There are no flies on me," the late 19th century version of "bug off" and "whatever" put together. Apparently the practice did not catch on or spread widely, since the college football jersey version of the sloganeering t-shirt has become the accepted history. (If it's in Wikipedia, it must be true, right?)

Back to the future We have one more "confluence" to mention in regard to t-shirts, and that's the fact that modern electioneering, modern media, modern manufacturing, modern marketing and modern t-shirts all converged in the period from 1890-1920. In 1896, the first modern campaign buttons were mass-manufactured for the McKinley-Hobart presidential ticket, the first advertising agencies opened in New York (not on Madison Avenue, though) and business was booming in Everytown, USA. This meant that modern media - brochures, billboards, blimps, electric signs, stickers, banners, magazines and, soon, radio - would be harnessed for commercial as well as political purposes. "Slap a sticker on everything that moves" was the battle cry of the small-format printers who had discovered spot printing - and spot adhesives - for making small, self-stick cards, buttons and posters.

It was a natural progression from "stickers on everything" to "everything's a sticker" - at least, everything that could be a sticker was worth a shot. After colleges and high schools got their custom t-shirts (mostly sweatshirts, at first), various manufacturers took a stab at printing on t-shirts. It is impossible to say who was "first," but among the earliest to do so was Sam Kantor, owner of Tropix Togs of Miami. By the late 1940s, Tropix Togs and Sherry Manufacturing, also in Miami, were printing shirts with resort names, images licensed from Walt Disney and other custom messages. Things really took off in the 1960s, though, with full and unfettered expression of the "hippie" ideology, creating best-sellers out of shirts with marijuana leaves, Che Guevara and the Grateful Dead.

Plastisol, a durable and stretchable ink, was developed in 1959 and continues to be refined along with other elements of the t-shirt manufacturing and printing processes. Today, the t-shirt is not considered an undergarment at all, and printed shirts are as numerous as unprinted ones, and available throughout the entire world. If you can't find exactly the right message, you can get a custom shirt printed on demand from various online merchants, or buy a low-cost stenciling kit to make your own.BackwardFish.com is a leading supplier of christian t shirts online today. Visit us today for a large selection of cool Christian T-shirts for you or as a great gift.


Related Tags: fashion, clothing, media

Your Article Search Directory : Find in Articles

© The article above is copyrighted by it's author. You're allowed to distribute this work according to the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs license.
 

Recent articles in this category:



Most viewed articles in this category: