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| - The Cooper Underwear Co., now known as Jockey International, did market T-shirts to bachelors as items that did not need regular maintenance requiring sewing skills.
T-shirts were not invented in 1904. Rather, versions of the garment — typically worn as underwear — already existed in the 19th century.
A New York Times Magazine article said the Cooper Underwear Co. popularized, but did not invent, T-shirts, mentioning a 1904 advertisement. The company does not take credit for inventing the T-shirt but agrees with New York Times Magazine's assessment of its role in the T-shirt's history.
For years, social media users have claimed that T-shirts were invented in 1904, and that advertising campaigns marketed them to bachelors who couldn't sew or replace buttons.
Posts on Reddit, Facebook
(Facebook user Fact bronze)
One Reddit post that had over 3,000 upvotes at the time of this writing dated back to 2014.
TIL the T-shirt was invented in 1904 and marketed to bachelors who couldn't sew or replace buttons
byu/DJWalsh intodayilearned
It was not possible to pin down an exact inventor or origin for the T-shirt, as clothing tends to evolve over time rather than be invented, according to Emma McClendon, assistant professor of fashion studies at St. John's University. People in the United States and Europe wore T-shirts as underwear in the 19th century — long before 1904 — but did not regularly wear the garments on their own until around the 1940s to 1950s.
However, credible evidence suggests that companies did market crew-neck, knit shirts to bachelors as clothing that did not require sewing skills to maintain. In other words, T-shirts were not invented in 1904 for bachelors who could not sew, but ads marketing versions of the T-shirt as such did exist. Therefore, we rate this claim as a mixture of truth and falsehood.
T-shirts for bachelors
The claim appeared to have originated from a 2013 New York Times Magazine article titled, "Who Made That T-Shirt?" That story referenced a supposed 1904 Cooper Underwear Co. advertisement announcing a "new product" aimed at bachelors with no sewing skills.
However, the same article said that although "the Cooper Underwear Company popularized the crew-neck shirt, they did not invent the style."
Matthew Waller, a spokesperson for Jockey International — formerly Cooper Underwear Co. — said he
According to the article, the 1904 Cooper Underwear Co. ad marketed a "bachelor undershirt" with the slogan "no safety pins — no buttons — no needle — no thread." Waller said Jockey International did not have this advertisement in its own archives, but he provided a link to an image he believed the author referenced and pointed to its similarities with an ad the company's historian found in its archives.
The ad from Jockey's archives advertised a cotton "bachelor shirt" as having "no button-holes to get too big for the buttons, no buttons to come off or to need sewing on, no safety-pins needed to keep it closed." "TRY OUR NEW WAY," the ad proclaimed.
Left: The advertisement Jockey International's spokesperson, Matthew Waller, believes the New York Times Magazine article referenced. Right: A similar advertisement from Jockey's archives. (Heddels and Matthew Waller / Jockey International)
Thus, even if the ad the New York Times Magazine article referenced was not real, it is true that Jockey, then Cooper Underwear Co., once advertised long-sleeved cotton crew-neck shirts to bachelors as a form of clothing that required no sewing abilities
Both advertisements showed long-sleeved, crew-neck shirts. In other words, these advertisements did not show that Cooper Underwear Co. invented modern short-sleeved tees.
It is worth noting that these images advertised what "would have been underwear" in the early 1900s, said McClendon, the fashion professor. People who owned the shirts would not have worn them alone, but rather underneath buttoned shirts and other outerwear. Bachelors who wore these undershirts would still have needed sewing skills
True history of the T-shirt
People in Europe and the United States wore versions of T-shirts as undergarments at least as early as the 19th century, McClendon said.
"A T-shirt — as we sort of still wear them today — they're cotton knits. They're stretchy," McClendon said. "That was usually a material used for undergarments."
Undergarments were important pre-20th century, McClendon said, because there wasn't widespread access to washing machines, running water and other ways to easily launder clothing. People wore undershirts because they were easier to wash and they helped absorb sweat and body odor.
In the early 1900s, people still largely wore T-shirts as underwear, and companies marketed them as such. For example, see this Sears catalog from the time period.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, as can be seen in the below screenshot, the earliest known printed use of the word "T-shirt" was a 1912 advertisement in the Daily Princetonian, Princeton's independent student newspaper. The American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald was also famously among the first to write down the word "T-shirt" — it appears in his 1920 novel, "This Side of Paradise."
(Oxford English Dictionary)
According to an article by Shaun Cole, an associate professor in fashion at Winchester School of Art, these undershirts were often worn by sailors, "and their transformation to the T-shirt has been attributed to naval adoption and adaption." A Sears catalog from 1938 advertised a garment resembling a modern-day T-shirt as a "Gob style all purpose shirt" to use as both underwear and outerwear. ("Gob" is slang for "sailor.")
By the 1940s, T-shirts were part of the standard kit provided to World War II soldiers, according to the National Museum of the American Sailor. Photographs from the time often showed sailors wearing T-shirts as outerwear — see this celebrated 1942 LIFE magazine cover — but according to Cole, "most men still wore their T-shirts underneath their shirts."
Cole also noted that T-shirts largely weren't considered outerwear in mainstream society until Hollywood got involved. In 1951, Marlon Brando starred in "A Streetcar Named Desire," the film based on the play of the same name. "He is shown on camera in just the white T-shirt," McClendon said of Brando's appearance in the film. "This sort of transforms the shirt into something associated with a kind of sexual masculinity."
Brando again wore a T-shirt in the 1953 movie "The Wild One," followed by James Dean in 1955's "Rebel Without a Cause."
Left: U.S. Navy baseball team players during World War II, September 1944. Right: Marlon Brando in "A Streetcar Named Desire," 1951. (Getty Images)
The association with popular culture solidified the T-shirt as a symbol of youth culture and rebellion into the 1950s, McClendon said, resulting in tees becoming part of counterculture movements in the 1960s, when they became the perfect "blank canvas to put all sorts of slogans on."
To summarize, in the early 1900s some companies did market versions of what would become the modern-day T-shirt as items for bachelors without sewing abilities. However, T-shirts were not invented in 1904 for bachelors who couldn't sew — by that time, they already had a history as undergarments.
Previously, we investigated why white tank tops — another undergarment Brando helped to popularize as everyday wear — are sometimes called "wife beaters."
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