--- title: "The White T-Shirt Was Navy Underwear First" url: https://quietmenace.com/style/white-t-shirt-history/ author: Quiet Menace Editors section: Style published: 2026-10-11 updated: 2026-10-11 topics: Wardrobe Essentials, Menswear History, Heritage Brands, Film --- # The White T-Shirt Was Navy Underwear First > Issued to sailors in 1913, worn as an entire outfit by Brando in 1951. The plainest thing in your closet has the busiest résumé. The cover of Life magazine for July 13, 1942, featured a T-shirt printed for the Air Corps Gunnery School. By then the plain cotton crewneck had been official US Navy issue for nearly thirty years, and printed ones were still rare. Within a decade Marlon Brando would wear the same plain shirt on a movie screen with nothing over it. Few garments have climbed so far from where they started. The white tee began as the part of a sailor's uniform nobody was supposed to see. ## Underwear with sleeves The T-shirt descends from the union suit, the one-piece underwear that covered a man from wrists to ankles. In the nineteenth century people began cutting it into separate tops and bottoms, and by the late 1800s miners and stevedores had adopted the top half for hot, heavy work. It was cheap and it washed easily. In 1913 the US Navy first issued the shirts as undergarments. Short sleeves and a crew neck were practical aboard ship. By the 1920s the word T-shirt had entered American English and Merriam-Webster, named for the shape it makes laid flat. Through the Great Depression it was the default shirt for farm and ranch chores, a working garment rather than a fashion one. ## How did underwear end up in the movies? The war did most of the work. After World War II, Navy men kept wearing T-shirts as undergarments, and returning veterans started wearing them casually with their uniform trousers. Millions of men came home already used to the shirt, the same route that brought the [MA-1 bomber jacket](https://quietmenace.com/style/ma-1-bomber-jacket-history/) and plenty of other military kit into civilian closets. Hollywood finished the job. In 1951 Marlon Brando played Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire in a T-shirt so tight and so plainly visible that it stopped reading as underwear. Four years later James Dean wore a white T-shirt under a red jacket with jeans in Rebel Without a Cause, and that combination became the template for American youth on screen. Pair it with a good pair of [raw selvedge jeans](https://quietmenace.com/style/raw-denim-selvedge-guide/) today and you're still dressing from Dean's costume notes. What Brando and Dean established was attitude more than garment. A white T-shirt on its own signaled a man who didn't need to dress up and didn't care who knew it. That reading has never fully gone away. ## Ink, slogans and Miami Vice The plain tee became a canvas in the decades that followed. Plastisol ink, invented in 1959, gave screen printers durable, stretchy prints, and the 1960s and 1970s filled T-shirts with protest slogans, band logos, ad campaigns and Milton Glaser's I Love NY. The blank white version never disappeared. It just became the thing everyone printed on. ![A man in a white T-shirt standing in front of a window](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1600267187764-a9da40dfa122?w=1600&h=1067&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop) *Still the shirt that asks the least of you and shows the most. Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash* Then in the mid-1980s Don Johnson wore a white T-shirt under an Armani suit on Miami Vice, and the undershirt moved one more step up the ladder. Wearing a tee with tailoring is now so ordinary it's hard to remember it once looked like a provocation. The Wikipedia [T-shirt entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-shirt) covers the printing side of the story in more depth. ## The heavyweight turn Most tees were light, cheap and sold by the pack. Hanes, founded in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, at the start of the twentieth century, became the name most men associate with the multi-pack undershirt. The shift toward heavier cotton came from Hanes too. In 1975 a marketing manager noticed that large numbers of blank T-shirts were shipping to California and Hawaii, where people bought them to decorate. The existing shirts were too thin and came in too few colors, so the company built one meant to be worn on the outside. That was the Beefy-T, in [6-ounce ringspun cotton](https://www.ppai.org/media-hub/hanes-celebrates-50-years-of-the-beefy-t/), and it marked its 50th anniversary in 2025. Camber took heaviness further. The company traces its roots to a fabric plant started in Pennsylvania in 1948 and launched the Camber label in 1992. Its Max Weight tee has been sold since the 1990s at High! Standard, a shop in Daikanyama, Tokyo. If you're heading there, our [Daikanyama and Nakameguro guide](https://quietmenace.com/travel/tokyo-daikanyama-nakameguro-guide/) maps the neighborhood. Japanese buyers have dug through bales of used American clothing for Champion's [Reverse Weave hoodie](https://quietmenace.com/style/hoodie-history-champion-reverse-weave/) for much the same reason. Lady White Co. came at the problem through construction rather than weight. Phillip Proyce, who had worked at Rising Sun Jeans, showed the brand at Inspiration LA in February 2015 with a white tee made in Los Angeles from start to finish, knit in tubular jersey from unbleached cotton so it has no side seams at all. ## How to buy a good one Shoulder seams should sit on the edge of your shoulder bone, not drop down the arm. Sleeves should end around the middle of the bicep and sit close without gripping. The hem should land around the middle of your fly, long enough to stay tucked if you tuck it and short enough to wear loose. Check the collar before anything else. A thick, tight rib holds its shape after washing, and a flimsy one turns into a wavy line within a month. Heavyweight cotton reads as a shirt in its own right and drapes better under a [chore coat](https://quietmenace.com/style/chore-coat-french-work-jacket/). Lighter cotton is what you want under an [oxford button-down](https://quietmenace.com/style/oxford-cloth-button-down-history/). Buy the size that fits after washing, since unwashed cotton tees can shrink. With shorts and [penny loafers](https://quietmenace.com/style/penny-loafer-bass-weejuns-history/) a heavy white tee handles most of summer on its own. More basics worth owning are on our [wardrobe essentials hub](https://quietmenace.com/topics/wardrobe-essentials/) and in the [Style section](https://quietmenace.com/style/). Run a hand down the side of a Lady White Co. tee and there's no seam to find. The body comes off the machine as a single tube of cotton, which leaves the collar as the only real decision anyone made. --- Filed under: [Wardrobe Essentials](https://quietmenace.com/topics/wardrobe-essentials/), [Menswear History](https://quietmenace.com/topics/menswear-history/), [Heritage Brands](https://quietmenace.com/topics/heritage-brands/), [Film](https://quietmenace.com/topics/film/) Hero image: Photo by Anomaly on Unsplash (Unsplash License)