A brief history of the graphic T-shirt: From bands to Budweiser, to Eisenhower and political power

If you happened to be hanging out behind the scenes with Led Zeppelin in the late 1970s and were given one of the band’s special graphic T-shirts — designed to circumvent people counterfeiting backstage passes — then now be the time to cash in. One from 1979 would today be valued at around £8,000. That said, if you can find a T-shirt for the long defunct New York restaurant Home, as photographed being worn by John Lennon, that will get you closer to £15,000. No, wait - that’s for the T-shirt actually worn by John Lennon...

Anyway, the point is that graphic T-shirts, especially vintage ones, are hot property right now, valued both for their individuality — there’s a good chance you’ll never see someone in the T-shirt you’re wearing — and their authenticity. That is, at least if you’re wearing an original (look for single stitch needlework, papery neck-tags and anything ‘Made in the USA’) rather than a reproduction. But also because, well, rock ’n’ roll has forever given them the aura of instant cool.

Indeed, among the most ‘classic’ (or cliched) of graphic T-shirts are those designed to promote bands: Nirvana’s squiggly smiley, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon prism, Joy Division’s Peter Saville-designed Unknown Pleasures or Rolling Stone’s John Pasche-designed hot lips logo, as well as simply the band-name typography for the likes of AC/DC, Ramones, Kiss, Run DMC or The Beatles. It was that last band’s manager, Brian Epstein, who might well be credited with the band T-shirt’s invention. But ask Pedro Pascal - who has been hitting the red carpet in band T-shirts of late - and he’ll say The Cure’s Boys Don’t Cry is where it’s at.

Express yourself and / or brand values...

Yet the graphic T-shirt isn’t just about the lucrative merchandising of bands. It’s brands too: as the obsession with showing off our clothing labels has grown, a brand T-shirt has been a blunter and cheaper way of expressing your affinity for fashion. Or, in fact — thanks to accessible printing technology and the online marketplace — your affinity for absolutely anything, be that your favourite sport, film or art, your love of cats, your more provocative politics, exceptional good taste or your incredible sense of humour (see “I’m with Stupid”; or “…and all I got was this lousy T-shirt”).

“The graphic T-shirt allows you to say something about who you are in a direct but uncomplicated way - to express your loyalties or opinions,” says Patrick Grant, of TV’s Sewing Bee fame but also the man behind Community Clothing. “There’s a kind of tribalism to the graphic T-shirt”.

It is also, of course, free advertising for anything that makes it onto a T-shirt that people want to wear. No wonder non-clothing brands were the first to exploit the potential of the graphic T-shirt as a form of mobile advertising: it was the producers of The Wizard of Oz, who in 1936 created what is thought to be the world’s first graphic T-shirt, bearing an image from the film.

The idea did not spread, however, until after World War Two, when Ed Roth, an ex-GI used to wearing his army-issue ‘t-type’ shirt stencilled with his details, launched the first major T-shirt screen-printing business. American politicians soon saw the potential of the T-shirt as a promotional tool — Thomas Dewey, Republican presidential candidate in 1948, launched the first campaign T-shirt with his “Dew it with Dewey” slogan (he lost), with Eisenhower later doing similar with “I Like Ike” (he won and was elected President).

Remarkably, although Disney was putting Mickey on T-shirts by the mid-1950s, it wasn’t until 1965 that Budweiser (soon followed by the tobacco industry, similarly keen to circumvent advertising restrictions of the time) became the first name in consumer goods to make use of this inexpensive, mass-market, effective medium; effective because a lot of people were ready to become a human billboard, regardless of the message, for the sake of a free T-shirt.

I *Heart* slogans

By the 1970s, with younger generations now defined by their own casualwear and as the graphic T-shirt became something people would pay for, fans rightly became pickier.

Graphic T-shirts would be worn either because their messaging genuinely reflected the wearer taking a side on a topic of the times - there was a boom in anti-Vietnam War Ts, for example, with, thanks to new screen-printing methods and better Plastisol inks, counter-cultural groups making up their own statement Ts; or simply because the graphics were actually of artistic value. It was for this reason that Milton Glaser’s much-imitated 1976 “I [heart] NY” T-shirt would become so iconic.

Certainly with much menswear on the subdued side — shunning too much bold pattern or bright colour — the graphic T-shirt is also a chance to break out a little.

“It’s fun, a break from the plain navy T-shirt you might otherwise wear,” says Grant - even if he still recommends subtlety over spectacle. Community Clothing’s take focuses around simple black drawings on white T-shirts - small celebrations of the custard cream or rich tea biscuit, or, coming soon, its “shit first cars” collection, as Grant calls it, featuring the Mk1 Fiesta or the Austin Metro.

Nostalgia and power

“That’s the other aspect of the graphic T-shirt,” says Rachel Jones, senior lecturer in fashion marketing at the University of Westminster.

“It’s not just that it’s often nostalgic — an acceptable way for grown-ups to indulge in their fandom, their lost youth or in things that might in another context be considered a bit childish. It’s that the graphic T-shirt is often deeply ironic, or used to subvert expectations. It’s more likely that you get an adult man wearing, say, a Taylor Swift T-shirt not because he’s a diehard Swiftie but because there’s a certain cheeky knowingness to it”.

Of course, the T-shirt graphic can be deeply serious too: when the fashion designer Katharine Hamnett met prime minister Margaret Thatcher in 1984, she wore a T-shirt boldly stating that “58% Don’t Want Pershing” (a reference to the controversial decision to base US nuclear weapons in western Europe), knowing full well how it would play in press photographs next day.

But with the graphic T it’s hard to keep commerce down. It was only a matter of weeks before Hamnett's style was co-opted by Frankie Goes To Hollywood for their “Frankie Says Relax” T-shirts and by Wham as “Choose Life” for theirs.

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