T-SHIRTS! Celebrating and understanding the cotton canvas

Perhaps the most ubiquitous of products, the design and function of a T-shirt is simple. It fits over your body, your arms go through two holes at either side, and your head goes through the hole at the top.
They are cheap and readily available, relatively comfortable, and they help to keep you warm and not exposed to the world. Sometimes they say funny things on them. End of story.
Not so fast.
With art, commerce and morality coming into play, the simple T-shirt is no longer, and never was, simply a T-shirt. For a generation drenched in irony and rampant sloganeering, the cultural importance of the T-shirt canvas is apparent to anyone who has traversed the corridors of any high school, university or shopping mall.
Ami Keahola, an editor of the design, technology and culture weblog Cool Hunting (coolhunting.com) said that, "As a fashion staple, it's taken on a symbolic status over time, making it full of significance as an everyday object and an effortless way to play on notions of high versus low culture".
Today's endless variety of T-shirts does just that. No longer a useless garment, masters of screenprinting, graphic arts, illustration and painting have embraced the T-shirt as a living canvas. Once overlooked as mere utility, and once even shocking to a society scared of atomic bombs and rebellious teeny-boppers, some of the most prestigious art and modern art galleries in the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and the Tate Modern in London have all released their own lines of T-shirts.
With countless online T-shirt shops and clubs springing up from Toronto to Tokyo, artists are using the plain cotton canvas as a medium of niche, specialized (and very often fantastically clever) expression of political will, philosophical enlightenments, or jokes about flatulence.
Still, they are overlooked daily and trivialized endlessly, but entire generations have co-opted the T-shirt as one of the chief means of personal expression.
"The T-shirt can be an art form. The tee is intensely personal, like a personal billboard," said Keahola.It should come as no surprise that politics, personal expression and a high regard for comfortable, practical fashion is not a new idea. The history of the garment and its immediate impact on politics and fashion dates back to the early '30s, but articles of clothing resembling a "T" shape have been found throughout the world dating back hundreds, even thousands of years.
Today's T-shirt comes from a much more recent time frame, however. Like many inventions, the first prototypical T-shirts were created out of necessity during wartime. Requiring a "light undergarment" for the hot summer months, European troops in the first and second World Wars donned garments resembling the T-shirt we know today. But it was not until almost two decades later when it took hold in popular style, becoming prized fashion treasures on the campus of the University of Southern California (USC) in 1932.
Requiring a cheap, breathable garment to absorb player's sweat and prevent chafing from shoulder pads, football coaches for the USC Trojans asked Jockey International Inc. to develop such a garment. While a great success on the football field and in the locker room, the shirts soon became prized fashion finds and status symbols for those lucky enough to wear the rugged rags around campus. In fact, the demand for these shirts became so high that school officials began emblazoning these shirts with, "Property of The University of Southern California" to prevent theft and unwarranted use of these reclusive shirts.
Gaining slowly in popularity and ubiquity in the following years, it was not until the '50s when the T-shirt once again became hip. Iconic images of Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire and James Dean in A Rebel Without a Cause demonstrated that, once again, wearing a T-shirt could be making a statement in itself.
Of course, mainstream adult culture picked up on the trend as well. In 1948 and 1952, political supporters of New York State Governor Thomas E. Dewey and American President Dwight D. Eisenhower wore shirts declaring that they would, "Dew It for Dewey" and, "I Like Ike" respectively.
Around that same time, Walt Disney commissioned Mickey, Minnie and his other beloved animated characters to appear on merchandise to be sold to the public. (Of course, Ralph Steadman also put Mickey Mouse on a T-shirt yet again decades later, but for an entirely different purpose).
By the mid-'50s, the T-shirt had gone fully mainstream. Vincent Minnetti, a New York fashion historian, claims that the popularity of the T-shirt was also due to increased leisure time and the prevalence of central heating in the household.
Regardless of reasoning, the T-shirt was no longer a shock to the masses, but a practical piece of cotton to keep flesh hidden and everything in its place.
This is not to say that the most common of clothing was not, and is not, used today as a means of expression. In the '60s, hippies tye dyed their shirts in various colours, and today oversized shirts are a staple of hip hop fashion sense. Even the most mediocre bands have a black concert tee of sorts, and countless people have voted for Pedro in the last couple years for some reason.
From soldiers in the trenches in 1913, to greasers, to earnest hipsters with a penchant for irony and irrelevance, to elderly gentlemen mowing the lawn, to sucka' MCs and Ike Eisenhower, the T-shirt is far more than a shirt in the shape of a 'T' that you put on your body. Coming from a rich tradition of appropriation by various cultural groups, and use as the most personal of billboards by many individuals, no longer should anyone claim that it is just something they threw on.