When was the t-shirt invented?

The garment we now call a t-shirt evolved from European union suits in the late nineteenth century, but its modern form was effectively standardised by the United States Navy in 1913, when a crew-neck, short-sleeved, white cotton undershirt became regulation issue under sailors' uniforms. Soldiers in the US Army adopted a similar garment during the First World War, particularly in the hot trenches of Europe. The word 't-shirt' itself entered American dictionaries in the 1920s, named for its silhouette.

Why did the Marlon Brando t-shirt scandal happen?

Because in 1951 a t-shirt was still considered underwear, and wearing it visibly in public was as improper as wandering down the street in your boxers. When Marlon Brando appeared in Elia Kazan's film A Streetcar Named Desire wearing a deliberately torn, sweat-soaked, body-hugging white tee as the brutish Stanley Kowalski, audiences and critics were genuinely scandalised. Newspaper columnists complained he was 'showing his underwear' on a cinema screen. The moral panic backfired completely — the look became aspirational overnight, and James Dean cemented the rebellion in 1955 with Rebel Without a Cause.

Are most t-shirts still cotton?

Less than people assume. The classic t-shirt was pure cotton, and the cleanest modern tees still are. But a large share of contemporary high-street t-shirts are cotton-polyester blends, sometimes labelled 'tri-blend' with rayon added in, and many are noticeably thinner than they used to be — fabric weight in grams per square metre has been quietly falling across the industry for years. A 180-200 gsm tee is what a t-shirt used to be. Many fast-fashion tees in 2026 are well under that. The composition label and, where given, the gsm figure are the only honest record.

How a War Invented the T-Shirt: The Saga of the World's Most-Worn Garment

The most-worn garment on Earth started life as military underwear. It took a world war to spread it. And one specific 1951 movie scene to make it acceptable to wear in public — a scene that genuinely scandalised the country at the time. The full saga of the white tee.

TL;DR. The modern t-shirt was standardised by the US Navy in 1913 as crew-neck cotton underwear. The First and Second World Wars spread the habit. Then in 1951, Marlon Brando wore one as outerwear in A Streetcar Named Desire and audiences wrote angry letters calling it indecent. Within a decade the white tee was everywhere — and within seventy years, the most ordinary garment in the world.

From Union Suit to Undershirt

For most of the nineteenth century, what a Western man wore against his skin was a union suit — a one-piece long-sleeved, long-legged garment of wool or cotton, buttoned up the front, that did everything from base layer to pyjama. It was hot, scratchy, and slow to dry.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, factories began cutting the union suit into two: a long-sleeved drawer and a separate undershirt. The undershirt got progressively shorter, lighter, and — crucially — knitted rather than woven, which made it stretchier and far cheaper to mass-produce. By the early 1900s, a recognisable short-sleeved, crew-neck cotton vest existed in catalogues across America and Europe.

1913: The Navy Standardises It

The garment got its definitive shape from the military. In 1913, the United States Navy issued regulations specifying a crew-neck, short-sleeved, white cotton undershirt as standard issue for sailors, to be worn under the uniform jumper. The reason was prosaic: ship's engine rooms and tropical postings were brutally hot, and sailors had been stripping off their wool jumpers to work, exposing their bare chests in a way the navy considered unprofessional. The undershirt was a compromise — a layer that kept the appearance of being dressed even when the jumper came off.

Within a few years the US Army had adopted something similar. The First World War accelerated it. American soldiers fighting in the heat of Europe took to the new lightweight cotton undershirt in vast numbers, and many of them brought the habit home in 1918. The word t-shirt appeared in print in the 1920s, named for the silhouette laid flat: a capital T.

1939-1945: The War That Spread It

The Second World War was where the t-shirt truly went global. The US military issued it by the millions to soldiers, sailors and marines fighting in every climate. In the Pacific theatre, in particular, the heat and humidity made the cotton undershirt indispensable — soldiers worked, slept, and fought in it.

When sixteen million American servicemen demobilised between 1945 and 1947, they brought the t-shirt home as a domestic habit. It was comfortable, cheap, washable, and reminded a generation of their service. Life magazine ran a cover in July 1942 showing an Army Air Corps trainee in a plain white t-shirt; it was already a recognisable American image.

But — and this is the part most modern wearers do not realise — it was still underwear. You wore a t-shirt under a shirt. You did not wear it as a shirt. Doing so in polite company in 1948 was as improper as wandering down Fifth Avenue in your boxers.

1951: Brando Breaks the Taboo

The break point has a date and a face. In 1951, Elia Kazan's film adaptation of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire opened in American cinemas. The leading man was a twenty-seven-year-old Marlon Brando, playing the brutish, magnetic Stanley Kowalski. For most of the film he wore a deliberately torn, sweat-soaked, body-hugging white t-shirt — wardrobe choices made by Kazan and costume designer Lucinda Ballard specifically to signal Stanley's working-class physicality and to put Brando's body on screen in a way Hollywood had never quite done with a male lead.

The reaction was a small cultural earthquake. Newspaper columnists wrote angry letters and editorials accusing the film of indecency. Critics complained Brando was "showing his underwear" on screen. The Catholic Legion of Decency demanded cuts. And — as moral panics about cinema reliably do — the outrage made the look irresistible. Young men in particular wanted Brando's tee, his jeans, his motorcycle silhouette.

Four years later, in 1955, James Dean finished the job. In Rebel Without a Cause he wore a plain white t-shirt under a red windbreaker for most of the film. Dean died in a car crash on September 30th, 1955, less than a month before the film opened. The t-shirt was now mourning, rebellion, youth and sex, all at once.

From Outerwear to Wallpaper

From there the arc is familiar. The 1960s gave the tee politics — band logos, protest slogans, the screen-printed shirt as a billboard. The 1970s gave it brands. The 1980s and 90s gave it luxury fashion, when Calvin Klein and Comme des Garcons started selling plain white tees for the price of a suit. And the 2000s and 2010s gave it fast fashion, which drove the price of a basic cotton t-shirt down to under five dollars and quietly began trimming the fabric.

Today the t-shirt is so ordinary that the average person owns dozens and rarely thinks about any of them. The garment that scandalised America in 1951 is the most produced piece of clothing in human history; rough industry estimates put global production above two billion units per year.

Why This Matters For What You Wear Today

Knowing the saga changes what you are looking at. A white t-shirt is not a default. It is the inheritor of a hundred years of military logistics, Hollywood scandal and industrial cost-cutting. Every choice that made it possible — knitted cotton, mass production, the slow normalisation of underwear as outerwear — is still embedded in the garment you put on this morning.

The thing that has changed in the last twenty years is what the t-shirt is actually made of. The classic tee was pure cotton, often a substantial 180 to 200 grams per square metre. A great many modern ones are blends — cotton with polyester, sometimes with elastane, sometimes labelled "tri-blend" with rayon — and noticeably lighter than they used to be. The fabric has been quietly cut, the same way the fabric weight of a suit jacket or a winter coat has been quietly cut. The price stays. The shirt thins.

The composition label, and where brands list it the gsm figure, is the only honest record of what is happening. Brando's t-shirt was 100% cotton, somewhere north of 200 gsm, and built like a sail. If you want the garment he made acceptable, that is still what to look for on the label.