In 1976, the Ramones’ presidential seal t-shirt was designed by Arturo Vega, the band’s creative director. While the t-shirt was created to promote the band, its simple yet specific design established it as a garment independent of its origins. At most shows, the Ramones sold more t-shirts than records. Some people wore them to show they had been to the concert; others wore them solely to be associated with the band.
The band t-shirt has since become a ubiquitous fashion staple, and you don’t necessarily have to be a fan of a classic group like the Ramones to walk around in their merch. In early days, band tees were much harder to get ahold of. Today, you can buy the same Ramones shirt anywhere, from Etsy to Walmart. Does the fact that anyone can wear it — regardless of whether they love the music or even know anything about Joey, Dee Dee, Johnny, and Tommy — alter the meaning of wearing a Ramones t-shirt?
The band t-shirt would be inconceivable without the popularization of the t-shirt in general. In 1951, Marlon Brando appeared on the silver screen as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. Wearing blue jeans and a white tee, Brando’s Kowalski is remembered for his charisma, brutality, and working-class style. The t-shirt, once associated with military attire, took center stage as a rebellious, macho signifier. Young men were drawn to this powerful new depiction of the working class.
But long before Streetcar made its cinematic debut, t-shirts got their start at the end of the 19th century with the union suit, one-piece long underwear. The union suit fell out of use at the beginning of the 20th century due to its incompatibility with warmer weather. According to the BBC, male workers redefined their uniforms by cutting them, with the top half being slightly longer to tuck into the bottom. Noticing the trend, in 1904 the Cooper Underwear Company started manufacturing what it called bachelor undershirts, a buttonless version of the top half of the union suit — essentially a modern t-shirt.
Bachelor undershirts were sometimes worn as outerwear, but because of their origin as an undergarment, this new style caused the wearer to appear rebellious. In 1938, hoping to tap into the trend, American retailer Sears began producing white cotton t-shirts. While t-shirts were becoming more readily available, it wasn’t until Brando’s performance that these garments became everyday wear.
In the late 1950s, an Elvis Presley fan club created the first known band t-shirt. As a result, talent manager Colonel Parker agreed on a deal with merchandiser Hank Saperstein, through Saperstein’s company Special Products Inc., to commercially promote Elvis on merchandise. In 1956, a line of Presley-endorsed merch came out, including a t-shirt.
Following close behind, the Beatles put on their first U.S. tour in 1964, producing a mass of concert t-shirts. The tour generated over $1 million of revenue, likely due in part to the band merchandise.
At around the same time, rock concert promoter Bill Graham was making a name for himself, working with other notable promoters like Chet Helms. In the early 1970s, in collaboration with Dell Furano, owner of the Winterland Ballroom, Graham founded Winterland Productions, the first music merchandising company in the pop culture industry.
The production company offered a design that would soon become classic — the band’s logo on the front and their touring schedule on the back. By the 1980s, Winterland employed a 25-person art department.
As the band t-shirt was on the rise, so was the concept of being a teenager. Emerging as a distinct class in the 1940s, the teenager became a definitive social group in the 1960s. With this novel classification came the desire for certain identity markers. Teenagers wanted to fit in. To distinguish themselves, teenagers turned the band t-shirt into a status symbol. Its wearer was not only a fan of the band’s music but a believer in the message of that band. Subsequently, the band t-shirt’s power as a social medium was born.
By the mid-1970s, Graham’s t-shirt designs for bands such as The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane allowed fans to take home a piece of their experience and to connect to other fans. Through color palettes and logos, band t-shirts distinctly placed their wearers into cultural subgroups. Within these subcultures, context mattered. Identifying with a band and its rhetoric became more than just a way to advertise fandom. Wearers, now less invested in the bands themselves, wore band t-shirts to project an aura. People who may not have listened to any of The Velvet Underground’s album Peel Slowly and See were wearing “Banana t-shirts” because of its association with Andy Warhol. Issues of authenticity arose, especially when aspects of the wearer’s identity noisily challenged the shirt’s meaning. This tension is summarized in the colloquial challenge, “Name three songs,” often used to question the legitimacy of someone’s connection to a band or its culture.
The followers of punk rock felt this tension acutely. In the early punk scene, t-shirts were created and sold mainly by listeners for listeners at shows. The shift to wholesale distribution — with production companies such as Winterland — raised questions about a t-shirt’s and its wearer’s authenticity. For punk, the genre was — and arguably still is — heavily tied to unmistakable political and sociocultural beliefs that celebrate non-conformity and scorn “sell-outs,” so that merch for punk bands like Black Flag being hawked in a retail store like Hot Topic seem paradoxical.
But punk isn’t the only music genre with an authenticity problem. Today, stores like H&M, Primark, and Forever 21 sell Rolling Stones and Nirvana t-shirts. Similarly, luxury retailers like Barney’s have sold t-shirts for the bands Misfits and Black Sabbath at $175 apiece. The American apparel market, which has grown faster than the GDP, makes the band t-shirt’s role a multifaceted one. The garment was previously used to denote fandom or tie its wearer to a subculture; now it’s simply trendy.
When band t-shirts become fast fashion, perhaps its true worth is dictated only by the garment’s origins and the wearer’s passions. A sun-faded, stained Rolling Stones t-shirt worn by someone who’s been to a dozen concerts beats its Urban Outfitters counterpart every time.
Though the authenticity of a clothing item is important to some, many wearers simply do not care. Regardless, the band t-shirt remains a classic medium of self-expression.
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