Love & Revolution

The T-shirt, literally a T-shirt, is a short-sleeved, crew-necked shirt with a straight-cut torso that gives it the classic 'T' shape. Short-sleeved shirts worn by young Americans and Europeans in the 1950s and 1960s were strictly white, but by the late 1970s, the trend of wearing colored shirts, such as football or American football team jerseys, gained popularity.

Although similar clothing items with varying sleeve lengths can be found, examples of shirt-like garments only spread from the 18th century as undergarments and from the 19th century as workwear, due to their comfort and lack of collars, which were a distinctive element of elegance.

Sailors in the 19th century wore a variation of the shirt that closely resembled the contemporary model, characterized by the typical horizontal stripes.

In the 1940s, the US armed forces adopted the crew-neck shirt as part of the uniform for their servicemen. The use of the shirt then spread widely in Europe during World War II.

The widespread adoption of the T-shirt as a clothing item, beyond its use as underwear or workwear, solidified in the 1950s when American fashion spread worldwide through cinema. Famous actors like James Dean and Marlon Brando wore the typical white short-sleeved shirt over a pair of jeans on the big screen, and from that moment on, the T-shirt became a staple of contemporary fashion.

It was in the 1980s that the T-shirt established itself as a creative clothing item and a means of communication through ornamental designs and writings. The message conveyed through T-shirts took on various forms and meanings, whether ironic (the first smiley faces appeared on T-shirts), promotional, political, or geographical (such as city names on T-shirts produced by various Hard Rock Cafes worldwide).