From its private beginnings into its scandalous usage to its eventually laid back adoption, throughout history the undershirt has lived on most men. Fondly referred to as 'second skin', the presence of such base clothing has kept a barrier between the sweat and spoil of the male body, preventing it from leaking out into the public eye. Even with this utilitarian function, the undershirt has featured prominently in history as a suggestive feature, a thing of lurid hinting, until Clark Gable and Marlon Brando forced western society to reevaluate its place in men's fashion.
In the middle ages, most wore a linen undershirt beneath their coats and tunics as a hygienic approach to keep their ill-washed bodies wrapped. The societal standard maintained that any exposure to these underthings fell close to public nudity. A person showing their underwear proved a grave social offense, appearing lewd and undignified. Society included the undershirt in this discrimination. In the late 17th century, a vast change began to unfold. The landed gentry of the time took to wearing undershirts that featured collars which peeked, ever so scantily, out from under their coats. This provocative move reflected a sexual suggestion of subtly teasing that which lies underneath the dress. In modern terms, I could describe it as a G-string prominently displayed above a gentlelady's pantline. The undershirt collar was the whale tail of the late 17th century.
From this quiet step, the shirt exploded into the frilled and laced affair seen throughout most of the 18th and 19th century. The coat opened to expose more of the shirt. The shirt overtook the whole top dress. Any number of adornments flaunted the shirt underneath, like some sort of overcompensation. Not until the advent of the industrial revolution, through the 1800's, did things begin to change.
The technical advances of factory-made textiles and the cotton gin allowed a greater, more consumable, amount of cotton undergarments. Eventually, the linen dress shirt, which had risen so high as a standard article of clothing, separated itself from yet another undershirt. In the mid 1860's, this manufacture of consumable goods led to the awkward replacement of the undershirt by an undersuit, known as the union suit. This can best be pictured as the red flannel onesie that ole grandpa used to wear when he burst out of his house with a shotgun to get trespassers off his property, and the obligatory butt flap would open and hilarity would ensue.
The union suit would dominate the market in terms of underwear for the next half century. Always worn, seldom washed, this one-piece deal turned into the necessity that all men looked to as a part of life.
Along with the times, technology moved fast. By the early 1900's, bigger companies could make a union suit in minutes when it used to take days. This quick turnaround led to experimentation, trying to find new ways of making undergarments a consumable commodity. Conservative society resisted the change, and an uproar happened in 1911 when The Saturday Evening Post ran a pictured ad of a man in a union suit. All the public moral outrage of such a spectacle could not hamper the speed of fashion, however. In the very early 1910's the Chalmers Knitting Company chopped the union suit in half, thus effectively creating the undershirt.
The instant adoption of such fashion did not take place over this event, the government played an integral part. In 1913, on the eve of World War I, the United States navy began issuing a separate t-shirt and a buttoned form of boxer shorts as uniform. The boys went to war and came back t-shirted, boxered men, with most of the suggestive undertone still in tact. To couple with this youth popularization of the undergarment industry, a wild new fashion, known as dancing, began to sweep the prohibitive nation and the majority of young adults. They demanded a freer form of undergarment, and this did not include union suits.
So, unencumbered and slightly exposed, undershirts shone as overt young expression of sexuality in dance and life. This new freedom reigned as a sort of unchecked, and largely unsupported form of counter culture that tried to find their own in a sea of prudence and stuffily clothed adults. Well, much of this changed with the 1934 release of Clark Gable's It Happened One Night.
Charming and alluring, Clark Gable begins to undress in front of a young woman, cordoning off half of the room for her comforts. But, as he unbuttons, the audience finds that, unbelievably, he has no undershirt and brazenly shows us his uncovered chest. Even snopes.com doesn't know the whole truth of it, but rumors and reports surged that this scene dropped the whole underwear industry by 75%. Since Gable revealed everything, what could anyone else expect? Whether or not the business facts are true, this sentiment continued through the decade and the next.
Not until the 1950's did the lowly shirt make its resurgence. A whole male generation, back again from another war with the same uniform, continued the habit learned over seas and wore their undershirts. Only this time, it did not include even the slightest bit of sexuality. The public had seen Clark Gable. The hand had been tipped. It took another movie star to set the shirt on its course back to popularity. Marlon Brandon pulled off the stylishly cool solo t-shirt in A Streetcar Named Desire, which helped make it ubiquitous. In an interesting switch, he turned the sexual suggestion into laid back and relaxed which, the audience perceived as sexy.
While the shirt doesn't currently carry the exact same sense of laid back, sexy, cool as it did in the 1950's, for those that wear only a t-shirt, it certainly stands as a relaxed item. For gents like me, the undershirts I wear can no longer hold the promise of winking provocation. Instead, it must humbly settle with secretively playing the role of my second skin and keeping my sweat and dirt from offending those around me.
