Shirt

• 1. Introduction

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  A shirt, stitched together from linen threads around 3000 BC, is the oldest preserved garment in the world. Flinders Petrie discovered it in a First Dynasty Egyptian tomb at Tarkan. Whoever made it was skilled enough to pleat the shoulders and sleeves for form-fitting trimness while still allowing freedom of movement. A small fringe from the weaving process was deliberately placed at the neck opening and along the side seam as decoration. That ancient craftsperson understood something we still understand: a shirt is never just a covering. It is a signal. Who can wear one, what color it is, how it fits, whether it shows at all - these questions have shaped laws, political movements, and social hierarchies across thousands of years. What does it mean when a shirt is visible? What happens when the wrong person wears one? And how did an undergarment worn only by men become the catch-all term for almost everything we put on our upper bodies?

• 2. The Undergarment's Long Rise

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  Through the Middle Ages, a shirt was plain, undyed, and hidden. It sat against the skin, beneath outer garments, invisible to the world. In medieval artworks, the only figures shown with their shirts uncovered were shepherds, prisoners, and penitents - those at the margins of society. The shirt's exposure was a mark of low status or disgrace. By the seventeenth century, that had shifted. Men were permitted to let their shirts show, carrying something of the same charged meaning as visible underwear carries today. In the eighteenth century, the shirt played a more intimate role still: instead of underpants, men relied on the long tails of shirts to serve the function of drawers. Costume historian Joseph Strutt, writing in the eighteenth century, held that men who did not wear shirts to bed were indecent. That view persisted well into the following century. As late as 1879, a visible shirt worn without anything over it was considered improper. The shift from hidden necessity to accepted outerwear was slow, contested, and tied to changing ideas about the body itself.

• 3. Color, Class, and the Changing Collar

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  George Caleb Bingham's paintings captured the earliest appearances of colored shirts in the early nineteenth century. Before then, shirts were white. Colored ones were considered casual wear, fit only for lower-class workers. The social distance between a gentleman and a laborer could be measured in part by the hue of his shirt. One period account put it precisely: to wear a sky-blue shirt was unthinkable for a gentleman in 1860, but had become standard by 1920, and by 1980 was simply the most commonplace event. Across that same stretch of time, the shirt's collar became its own story. In 1827, a housewife named Hannah Montague, living in upstate New York, invented the detachable collar. Tired of washing her husband's entire shirt when only the collar needed cleaning, she cut the collars off and figured out how to reattach them after laundering. The frills and embroidery that decorated sixteenth-century men's shirts, and the long neck frills called jabots that were fashionable through the eighteenth century, gave way to more practical innovations. Collar stays, which connected collar points to the necktie to keep them flat, did not become popular until the 1930s. Their earliest forms resembled tie clips more than the small collar stiffeners found in shirts today.

• 4. When Women Wore Red

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  European and American women began wearing shirts in 1860. The catalyst was political and theatrical: the Garibaldi shirt, a red garment styled after the uniform worn by freedom fighters under Giuseppe Garibaldi, was taken up and popularized by Empress Eugenie of France. The style moved quickly from revolutionary symbolism to fashionable adoption. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Century Dictionary described a standard shirt in practical, unsentimental terms: cotton, with a linen bosom, wristbands and cuffs prepared for stiffening with starch, and a collar and wristbands that were typically separate and adjustable. The phrase "to give the shirt off one's back," first documented in 1771, was already in use to capture extreme generosity or desperation. The shirt as a marker of generosity, as a token one could sacrifice, had become embedded in the language even as the garment itself was still evolving.

• 5. Shirts and Political Identity

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  In the 1920s and 1930s, fascist movements across Europe and beyond turned shirt color into a declaration of allegiance. Italian fascists adopted black shirts. German Nazis of the SA wore brownshirts. In Ireland and Canada, a movement called the Blueshirts formed, sharing that color with Portugal's Nacional Sindicalistas, the Spanish Falange Espanola, the French Solidarite Francaise, and the Chinese Blue Shirts Society. Green shirts appeared in Hungary, Ireland, Romania, Brazil, and Portugal. Mexico had the Camisas Doradas, the golden shirts. The Silver Shirts organized in the United States. Norway's Fatherland League wore grey. Red carried its own layered history: it had dressed Garibaldi's Italian revolutionaries, nineteenth-century American street gangs, and socialist militias in Spain and Mexico during the 1930s - and the racist and antisemitic Bulgarian Ratniks also chose red. In 2008, shirt color marked the major opposing factions in Thailand's political crisis. Red shirts identified supporters of the populist People's Power Party; yellow shirts identified supporters of the royalist People's Alliance for Democracy. In India, party leaders of Dravidar Kazhagam wear only black shirts as a symbol of atheism. In Spain in the nineteenth century, and in Argentina under Juan Peron, the word descamisados - meaning "the shirtless" - described the masses of the poor. The presence or absence of the shirt, and its color when present, has never been purely a matter of fabric.

• 6. A World of Variations

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  By the late twentieth century and into the twenty-first, shirts had multiplied into a taxonomy that could fill a catalog. The T-shirt, originally worn under other shirts, became common everyday wear in some countries. The polo shirt - also called a tennis shirt or golf shirt - carries a longer back than front, a feature known as the "tennis tail." The guayabera is an embroidered dress shirt distinguished by four pockets. The thousand-miler shirt, a light brown garment worn predominantly by American travelling salesmen in the first half of the twentieth century, earned its name because it did not show dirt from long road trips; the style faded from common use around the 1960s. Among the stranger entries in any shirt classification are the punishment shirts: garments made for the condemned. These included supernaturally cursed shirts from mythology - the poisoned shirt said to have killed Creusa, daughter of Creon, and the Shirt of Nessus used in the killing of Hercules - as well as the Tunica molesta used in ancient Roman executions, and the Sanbenito worn during church heresy trials. The fabrics used to make shirts span two broad categories: natural fibres, with cotton now the most widely used, and man-made fibres including polyester. The four main weaves for shirt fabric are plain weave, oxford, twill, and satin. The size conversions between Asian and Western markets also reveal how differently the same garment is calibrated: an Asian size XXL corresponds to a US or EU size L.