History of the Custom T-Shirt Industry

The Making of the Apparel Graphic Industry 
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​The industry that creates and sells decorated apparel is an American phenomenon that emerged over time due to changing lifestyles and technological advances. Social and political movements. and evolving consumer preferences. The terminology for this industry today includes "decorated apparel," '·apparel graphics," embellished clothing," or "the T-shirt industry." But whatever you choose to call it. The field encompasses a vast realm of components - from those who create, manufacture, and distribute leisure apparel to those who transform "blank'" apparel into everything from utilitarian everyday garb to graphic masterpieces and trendy fashion attire.

History of the Graphic Apparel Industry

​A brief look into the industry's history will help anyone thinking of participating in the world of decorated apparel understand its roots, its cultural derivatives, and its continuing appeal.
The genesis event that started the T-shirt on its way to mass appeal occurred in 1913 when the basic white T-shirt was made part of the standard uniform of the U.S. Navy. By the 1930s, the T-shirt was marketed as a men's underwear product referred to as a "gob shirt" or
'gob-style" shirt, owing to its association with sailors.

Word War 2 and T-Shirts

​During WWII, T-shirts, though officially undershirts, became a preferred choice as a comfortable warm, weather garment, favored by American sailors serving in the South Pacific theater. After the war, T-shirts rose in acceptance as an underwear staple in the 1950s. With navy veterans leading the way, they moved to center stage as leisure and recreational apparel. 

1950's and T-Shirts

Among the factors driving the increase in appeal and mass acceptance was the leading role performance of actor James Dean in the motion picture Rebel Without A Cause in 1955. Hot on his critical success in East of Eden, Dean played a T-shirt-clad troubled teen and, in so doing, quickly attained celebrity as the reigning Hollywood symbol of alienation and volatility of the mid-50s youth culture. His death on September 30, 1955, affected the beginning of a personality cult following whose adherents saw Dean's T-shirt as an iconic representation of youth culture.

Marlon Brando, who, like Dean, embraced the naturalist ''method acting;' wore a white T-shirt under his leather motorcycle jacket in The Wild One. That visual permanently reinforced the "coolness" of T-shirts as the de rigueur apparel of the new American youth culture, as thoroughly masculine, and what any self-respecting teen male, rebellious or otherwise, should be wearing, especially when the ladies were around. Elvis Presley, too, merits mention as another pop culture icon who preferred wearing T-shirts when hanging out with his buds.

In the early '50s screen printed T-shirts -- and sweatshirts -- appeared, initially within the custom arena encompassing schools, colleges, clubs, and summer camps. By the mid-60s, printed tees and sweats had earned permanent positions on souvenir stands and college bookstores racks and shelves.
Colorful graphics emerged as an offshoot of the colorful custom art done on hot rods. Particularly in California and Florida, automotive airbrush artists enjoyed the fun and profit of turning their talents and high-pressure airbrushes from decorating funky cars to creating funky T-shirts, the standard uniform of gearheads.
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One popular method of multicolor decorating on shirts was to start with direct-screened black line-art or heal-printed graphics and colorize them by airbrushing additional colors onto the designs. Taking their cues from the street rodders, California airbrush artists made decorated T-shirts a fixture at the beach, too, where colorfully-designed T-shirts quickly became the favorite garb of surfers as The Beach Boys exploded on the music scene. Philadelphia heart-throbs Frankie Avalon, Bobby Rydell, and Fabian moved into their subsequent careers as stars of Hollywood's new genre - beach flicks - with Annette Funicello and other hot starlets; youth culture in the early '60s was being propelled by AM radio and network TV to mirror whatever was happening in California. And tens of millions of Mickey Mouse Club alumni, the first generation to grow up with T-shirts as an integral part of their attire, made T-shirts the virtual uniform of the Baby Boomers.

1960's and T-Shirts

The antiwar protest in the late 1960s elevated decorated T-shirts into a medium for mass expres­sion as well as for individual expression. Until the Vietnam War, deco­rated rated tees and sweats told the world where you visited as a tourist, what school or college you were attending, and who your favorite team was. With the T-shirt already the after-class garment of choice for col­lege students, young protesters quickly discovered their T-shirts could, with four spray-painted strokes, be emblazoned with a single icon to indicate where one stood on the question of continued American mili­tary involvement in Southeast Asia.

1970's and T-Shirts

​With prices hiked way up, major gasoline providers soon moved to become not only the wholesalers and distributors of gasoline but also its retailers. The traditional American institution of the service station that dispensed gasoline was earmarked for extinction. Big Oil canceled station leases where it could to eliminate competition from independent operators and reduced the volume available to those remaining operators where it couldn't. The corporate-owned gasoline superstation had replaced its two-pump ancestor within a few years. Thousands of small neighborhood and highway gas stations were vacated by their owners, who lost their leases and the ability to procure the gasoline for resale that provided them with their retail profits and their main drawing cards for customers.

Needing tenants for these highly-visible abandoned gas stations, their owners offered low rents to anyone who could cover the landlord's real estate taxes and monthly mortgages. Enter a cadre of Baby-Boomer entrepreneurs, now in their 20s and 30s, in search of low-cost locations for specific newly-emerging business categories that flourished in these old stations: plant and flower shops, specialty food and produce stores, and T-shirt shops.
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These new retail T-shirt stores offered immediate gratification through the medium of T-shirts decorated with heat transfers and custom iron-on lettering and at very reasonable prices. The generation that grew up in T-shirts and wore their political opinions in the '60s now opted to wear messages of their creation and colorful multicolor plastisol graphics. They could buy a while-u-wait custom gift for under ten bucks and had an alternative to sporting goods stores for outfitting the teams they -- or their kids -- played on. Customers soon began asking the retailers if they could provide what we refer to as custom orders for schools, businesses, events, and organizations today.

This Blog is Dedicated to Mark Venit

This blog comes from the works of industry consultant Mark Venit. Mark was a consultant for Northwest Custom Apparel for 20 years. We will miss you Mark. 
Jim and Erik Mickelson

The Business of T-Shirts

In-text: (Venit, 2011)Your Bibliography: Venit, M., 2011. The Business of T-Shirts. 1st ed. Philadelphia: Mark Venit, pp.132-143.