Where Are All the Old Black T-Shirts?

The modern T-shirt, though ubiquitous today, is a relatively young garment, and the black T-shirt is almost half as old. It took decades of iteration for the stark-white cotton undershirt, a working-class undergarment, to transform into the faded-black band tee, a coveted symbol of wealth. Early black T-shirts are extremely scarce, and understanding why involves tracing the garment’s origins, technological advancements, and the cultural shifts that made them possible.

The first cotton crewneck undershirt, sold as the “Bachelor’s Undershirt,” was marketed to single men in the early 1900s. This simple, button-free alternative to the Henley-necked undergarments of the time was designed for men who didn’t have someone to sew buttons on for them. In 1913, the U.S. Navy began issuing crewneck T-shirts, and by the First World War, they were standard issue. The Navy recognized their practicality in warm climates, particularly during physical conditioning.

It wasn’t until after the war ended that the term “T-shirt” was coined. The first recorded usage was by author F. Scott Fitzgerald in his 1920 novel This Side of Paradise, describing the undershirts packed by a character for boarding school. By the 1930s, the cotton T-shirt was ubiquitous as an undershirt. Companies like Sears and Hanes were calling them “Gob Shirts,” gob being a slang term for a U.S. enlisted sailor.

The Second World War demonstrated the practicality of the T-shirt to the over 323,000 enlisted members of the U.S. Navy and Marines. Servicemen referred to them as “skivvy shirts,” and they were particularly loved in the warm climates of the Pacific Theatre. Soldiers often dyed their white T-shirts with tea or coffee to create makeshift camouflage, a precursor to the sage green tees that would be issued later in the war. The U.S. Army resisted issuing a cotton undershirt until 1948, with the “quarter-sleeve undershirt.” After World War II, returning sailors brought their T-shirts home, incorporating them into civilian life as symbols of casual, anti-sartorial fashion.

Hollywood further transformed the T-shirt from a mere undergarment into an emblem of masculinity and rebellion. In the 1940s and 1950s, stars like Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, and James Dean showcased the T-shirt’s ability to accentuate male aesthetics on screen. Films like Rebel Without a Cause and A Streetcar Named Desire tied the garment to rugged individualism and youthful sexuality. Wearing intimates as outerwear was transgressive at the time, and the women who wore them were violating twice as many taboos. It wasn’t until the 1960s and 1970s, with the Beat Generation, feminist movement, and sexual revolution, that it became common to see women wearing T-shirts.

Though the first black T-shirt was the Bachelor’s Undershirt, which was sold in either “Fast Black” or “Balbriggan,” black tees didn’t become common until the 1950s. These early black shirts are almost exclusively durene jersey tees. This can likely be attributed to the fact that despite the color being closely associated with formal wear, mourning attire, and uniforms, it was also a school or team color. Early T-shirt prints were done with water-based inks that did not work well with dark colors, so the jerseys would feature appliqué or embroidered numbers and letters.

Plastisol was invented in 1959, providing an opaque, stretchable, and durable screen printing ink. With this introduction, black T-shirts could be more economically embellished with logos, slogans, and branding, paving the way for the edgier counterculture shirts of the 1960s and 1970s. Biker and punk culture adopted black T-shirts and gave us some of the most iconic graphics of the 1970s. The black Ramones T-shirt from this era is one of the archetypical band tees and remains one of the most recognizable shirts of all time. 

Today, black versions of almost any true-vintage item demand a premium. The scarcity of pre-1970s black T-shirts makes them particularly valuable. If you have one, please treasure it, but if you’re ready to let it go, our DMs are always open.