It feels natural now, but the chest pocket isn’t original to the T-shirt. Nor was it originally designed to hold glasses or pens. How the pocket became a normal feature is a windier tale than you might imagine. Even to this day, its difficult to pin down exactly how it happened, although a few known facts point to an obvious conclusion.
T-shirts, in their original form, weren’t something to be worn alone. Instead, the garment’s origins trace back to what we’d know today as long underwear that was specifically designed to be worn under a “union suit.” It was most commonly made from wool and thus far too hot to wear in summer. Fed up with overheating, the story goes, someone cut the garments in half, leaving the top long enough to tuck it into the bottom, and the T-shirt was supposedly born, at least in long-sleeve form.
From UNDERWEAR to the Army
Despite it’s growing adoption as an undergarment, wearing a T-shirt on its own remained taboo for quite some time. In fact, it was outlawed in some states. That was until it became standard issue in America’s armed forces.
As Pagan Kennedy of the The New York Times noted in a article back in 2013, in 1904, Army supplier Cooper Underwear advertised its “bachelor undershirt,” a T-shaped shirt with a stretchy neck and a henley-like button configuration. But by 1915 the military abandoned buttons, because soldiers lacked sewing skills and struggled to replace missing ones.
The term “T-shirt” is also at least partially credited to a famous source. F. Scott Fitzgerald is supposedly the first person to use the term in print according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
As such, the Army inched even closer to inventing the T-shirt as we know it. When soldiers left the service, they took their stock with them, and T-shirts became pedestrian — and very, very popular. First marketed to kids, the companies that manufactured them eventually catered to adults, too.
The term “T-shirt” is also at least partially credited to a famous source. F. Scott Fitzgerald is supposedly the first person to use the term in print according to the Oxford English Dictionary. It appeared in This Side of Paradise, published in 1920 as part of a packing list description.
