Americans, clothing and hats

Americans love to write on their clothing.  Shirts and hats are emblazoned with messages: I HEART NY, Female Body Inspector,  I’m with Stupid, any political message, humorous message or, especially, an affinity logo: the logo of one’s employer, or one’s alma mater or, of course, the logo of a sports team.  

The t-shirt.  A basic cotton undergarment, collarless and simple.  It should not have become outerwear at all.

 Until the 1950s, public wearing of t-shirts was limited to soldiers in basic training and school athletics classes.  Then, in the 1960s youth counterculture movement, young adults began adorning t-shirts with decoration, “tie-die”, emblems and messages.  This blossomed into a commercial process for ironing logos and prints onto shirts.  A new form of clothing was born: a wearable billboard.

T-shirts have been adopted as a statement of fashion, leading to the bizarrely named “designer t-shirt”.

Unwanted t-shirts end up recycled in the international market for used clothing, making their way from the West to the developing world.  Somewhere in Guatemala, a grandmother is wearing a “Mulroney Family Reunion” t-shirt while she takes her family to market; somewhere in Ghana, a refuse collector is wearing a shirt that says “My parents went to Florida and all I got was this lousy T-shirt”.

What is it with Americans and writing on their clothes??

The baseball cap is another ubiquitous form of American clothing.  Because it is so ubiquitous, I cover it under clothing and fashion, rather than under sports.  It adorns the heads of children, beanie-like and innocent, twirling propeller merely implied; it is worn by all manner of adults, from urban street folk to hedge fund managers.

​Until the early 1960s, it was socially mandatory for men to wear hats while out of doors in public, and most men wore either a felt hat with a brim, a working man’s cap or perhaps a straw hat if he was a farmer or it was the height of summer.  Some people theorize that JFK killed the social requirement of men wearing hats, but it more likely was the change wrought by the interstate highway system and car-friendly suburbs.  Starting in the early 1960s, suburban office parks sprang up next to interstate highways complete with parking lots.  Men barely were in public between car and office.  So why wear a hat at all?  That is one theory?  Another theory is that John F Kennedy killed off the mandatory men’s hat by not wearing a hat at his inauguration in 1960.