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SCREEN GEM
Michael Amsler
NORTH BAY BOH EM I AN | JUNE 4-1 0, 20 14 | BO H E M I AN.COM
Kerry McCracken cranks out a Pliny T-shirt at Farm Fresh HQ in Sebastopol.
L
ike so many icons of American culture, the T-shirt owes its ascendancy to the U.S. military. In what is widely considered the first printed T-shirt, an American Air Corps gunnery unit shirt made the cover of Life magazine in July 1942, complete with a wearer bearing a large weapon. But the history of the T-shirt goes back even further in military lore, to earlier American military adventures. The original T-shirt wearers were members of the
American Navy fighting in the Spanish American War at the end of the 19th century. The soldiers were issued T-shirts as part of their uniform, and they
henceforth carried the mantle of the T-shirt as outerwear. The T-shirt would become the goto garment for blue-collar America. In time, it would then emerge as an icon in its own right, malleable to the whims of the Zeitgeist. By the 1950s, T-shirt-cool had taken hold and spoke to the newly self-anointed American rebel spirit, with its whiff of anti-heroic martyrdom and the triumph of the
underdog: Marlon Brando in his white T-shirt prowling the waterfront, James Dean’s outsiderloner in denim and white cotton. “The T-shirt has been used to convey both rebellion and conformity, depending upon the context and the type of messages,” writes Diana Crane in her book, Fashion and Its Social Agenda: Class, Gender, and Identity in Clothing.