Why did we make ourselves into walking advertisements?

[FedoraFan112390]

Prior to the 1960s roughly, what a man or woman dressed was just a part of life; it was meant to pass along a sense of dignity and style. Even homeless men dressed well. After the 1960s, with the rise of 'design T-Shirts', men and women both have become walking advertisements. You can read on a person's shirt what movies they love, or what bands they like the most. We've become, with the rise of T-Shirts, walking advertisements...I feel this is one of the biggest distinctions between our time and the Golden or Silver Eras (anytime before the mid-late 60s really). The question is, why are we so okay as a culture with letting our attire act as advertisements, and will we ever go back to class?

 

[LizzieMaine]

Licensed sportswear goes back to the mid-thirties, when Disney made a killing selling Mickey Mouse sweatshirts -- which were certainly an advertisement for his product. By the early forties, similar sweatshirts and t-shirts were being sold featuring other popular culture characters such as the Lone Ranger, Superman, and Captain Marvel. In 1948, the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team licensed a line of sportswear for sale in the Sears catalog which included screen-printed T-shirts, sweatshirts, and collared "sport shirts" all depicting the team name and logos.

It was the success of these early experiments that led to further expansion of the idea. The kids who grew up wearing these types of shirts retained a fond spot for them as they grew up, and although the "hippies" started wearing them ironically in the sixties, the nostalgia fad of the seventies made them even more successful as mainstream items.

Short answer: Capitalism.

 

[2jakes]

Credit of the first printed tee (at least worn in a photo) often
goes to the Air Corps Gunnery School featured on the
July 13th, 1942 cover.

In the ‘50s, the tee-shirts were mostly plain
white, even if you were sometimes considered
a rebel without a cause!

 

[skydog757]

I think college and high school varsity jackets have been around a long time; it's an easy way to show your support or allegiance and display your awards/medals. Now, shilling for a product is something else again.

 

[LizzieMaine]

And of course a prominent makers' label has always been prominently displayed on various brands of jeans and overalls.

The Coca-Cola company struck a major licensing deal with a series of clothing manufacturers in the 70s as a way of heading off the abuse of their logo by bootleg t-shirt manufacturers. In the 60s they had sold various articles of logo clothing thru send-in-the-coupon offers, and this was seen as a logical extension of that idea.

The popularity of such outfits in the 60s was originally, as said earlier, meant to be ironic -- you showed how ridiculous it was for the Coca-Cola logo to be plastered on every available surface by plastering it on yourself. Beatniks in the '50s would sometimes do the same thing by incongruously wearing a Coca-Cola deliveryman's jacket or a jacket from a gas station even though they didn't actually deliver Coke or pump gas. It was meant to protest the way in which we allow our jobs to brand us.

But that note of protest was quickly co-opted by the Boys, as they usually do with just about everything.

 

[2jakes]

This was common in sports from way back.

 

[FedoraFan112390]

Credit of the first printed tee (at least worn in a photo) often
goes to the Air Corps Gunnery School featured on the
July 13th, 1942 cover.

Mostly they were just plain white, even if you were
a rebel without a cause!

Plain white I have no problem with. I just find this self-advertisement vulgar.

 

[LizzieMaine]

What's far worse than T-shirts are designer labels and logos on high priced clothing. Upscale idiots flashing their brands are far more gauche, ridiculous and vulgar than the t-shirt wearers down at the gravel pit.

 

[scotrace]

I have to point out that the notion of homeless people during the Great Depression dressing well is not accurate. They may have had a necktie on with their ripped bib overalls, but it was a skanky old greasy tie.
Imprinted T shirts declare something. "I like this group." "I support this cause." "I am a loyal customer of this company." Or just "this was a cool bar I went to on vacation and I wanted a memento."

 

[LizzieMaine]

A look at Dorothea Lange's Dust Bowl pictures will prove the truth of that. William Manchester in "The Glory And The Dream" had a vivid description of the urban Depression poor --

"Since welfare families had often been inadequately clothed before the Crash their rags three winters later sometimes defied description. It was not uncommon to see the head of a family dressed like a vaudeville tramp, wearing a buttonless suit coat out at one elbow, a pair of trousers out at the knee and in the seat, an old summer cap that had hung for years in some furnace room, worn tennis shoes covered by patched rubbers, a pair of mismatched canvas gloves; the whole covered by a filthy old sheepskin."

 

[Stearmen]

I would say something intelligent about this thread, but, I just noticed I am wearing my black Hogslayer t-shirt!

 

[Stearmen]

Of course, if you are really against t-shirts with your favorite brand on it, theirs always a tattoo! Just ask millions of Harley riders. For me, it would be The Unapproachable Norton of course!

 

[Tiki Tom]

What's far worse than T-shirts are designer labels and logos on high priced clothing. Upscale idiots flashing their brands are far more gauche, ridiculous and vulgar than the t-shirt wearers down at the gravel pit.

I completely agree. I refuse to be impressed by people who obsessively feel the need to flash high-end labels. However, it does advertise what they think is important.

 

[Edward]

But that note of protest was quickly co-opted by the Boys, as they usually do with just about everything.

Helped along by the masses who wish to be told what to wear / consume / look like / be...

Very similar to the jeans-worn-well south of the waist- look popularised by hip hop. Originally, that style , nodding as it does to being held in police custody, where your trews might sag because they've taken your belt (the 'gay' explanation might be amusing to give to homophobic, white suburban teens who adopted it as fashion later on, but it's not actually true), was a potent political statement coming from the hiphop hardcore. Only later was it emasculated into a form of crass fashion alone. Of course, that pretty much reflects the wider journey of hip hop itself....

Rather reminds me of the old cycle of Memory -> History -> Legend -> Myth -> Forgotten. But with better marketing, obviously.

Imprinted T shirts declare something. "I like this group." "I support this cause." "I am a loyal customer of this company." Or just "this was a cool bar I went to on vacation and I wanted a memento."

Humans are notihng if not tribal. Even those of us who reject the mainstream have our tribes and our tropes (Imelda May summed it up wodnerfully in Tribal - http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/imeldamay/tribal.html ). For some of us, that sense of belonging will centre on a style - punk, goth, w.h.y.. It's no coincidence that so many of us in the vintage tribe are old punks, goths and all sorts under the surface. I remember in my teens dressing as far as possible out of the local army surplus place. There was definitely a statement of sorts, incoherent as it may have been, about an Irish pacifist punk kid dressing in British army squaddie boots and German combat trousers. That my folks just didn't get it (I remember my dad trying to parse it out with me once, him being of the generation where military surplus worn for anything other than manual labour was a sign you just couldn't afford anything else) was undoubtedly part of the deal. I wasn't necessarily seeking to upset them, but I ure was making my mark as being my own person, having my own thing. Wearing some of the symbolism of the various military, deliberately inverted, was part of it all as I recall. Printed band t-shirts send out a signal of allegiance (at least they did before TopShop started selling Ramones and Motorhead shirts to little girls that thought it was a designer label.... ).

The ones that I find oddest are the very ordinary, plain white t-shirts - sort of thing that, designer logo aside, I can buy all day in the supermarket at three for a tenner, yet add a designer logo and people will queue up to buy at forty quid a pop. I long ago came to the conclusion that for folks who aren't confident in their own style statements and feel the need of the approval of a designer label or brand, it's a way of doing that - this must be cool because it's got a cool brand on it. Yeah, but it's not an ordinary white t-shirt - its a Tony Hellfinger one, so it's cool. That sort of thing. I don't intend that to sound as condescending as it probably reads. The world can be very cruel to people on grounds of what they were - I remember a lot of kids who positively dreaded our annual non-uniform days at school because of the viciousness of the mob.


The ones that really annoy me are the logos that spoil a reference. I recently saw a Big Bang Theory tshirt that bore the legend "I'm not crazy, my mother had me tested." The big BBT logo underneath it ruined it for me - I always much preferred that sort of thing to be a reference that people who got it would get, others, not. I guess that was me identifying as part of a tribe, seeking out my own, our shared rituals that "the others" didn't get, as distinct from advertising to all that I identified with a specific band/brand.

 

[HudsonHawk]

What's far worse than T-shirts are designer labels and logos on high priced clothing. Upscale idiots flashing their brands are far more gauche, ridiculous and vulgar than the t-shirt wearers down at the gravel pit.

I have a picture from about 1948 of my dad wearing a Roy Rogers tshirt. Of course, he lived on a dirt floor and couldn't afford shoes, so I doubt he was wearing it to make a fashion statement and more likely it was something either incredibly cheap or even found along the side of the road.

 

[LizzieMaine]

We have a picture in the family shoebox of my uncle in 1941 wearing a Captain Marvel shirt. The closer one looks at old family pictures the more this kind of stuff shows up. It was a fad in my neighborhood for boys and girls alike to use crayons to draw our own logos for whatever we were interested in on plain white t-shirts and wear them around for play clothes.

Licensed merchandising was actually one of the biggest success stories in business in the years just before the war. A hustler by the name of Kay Kamen got Walt Disney involved in the early thirties to start the ball rolling, and within a few years Disney was making more money from merchandise than he was from his movies. A sharp operator named Robert Maxwell formed a company called "Superman Inc." in 1940 to oversee commercial exploitation of the Man of Steel beyond comic books, and within a year he and his partners were rolling in money. And George W. Trendle established "The Lone Ranger Inc." to merchandise you-know-who and the shirts, playsuits, toys, pencil boxes and similar dimestore gimcrackery made him a millionaire.

There were even efforts to turn popular culture characters into brand names without using their actual images. In the early thirties, an operator from Baltimore tried to put out a line of work clothes under the "Amos and Andy" brand name, but NBC and Correll and Gosden, owners of the rights to that trademark, sued to put them out of business very fast.

 

[Edward]

There's a major debate coming on the legalities of all of this. Intellectual property concepts of copyright and trademark in law largely predate the modern era of merchandising. Disney has spent a lot of time lobbying Congress on copyright terms - it's instructive to look at the dates when major extensions of the copyright temr were made in the US and compare them with the looming exhaustion of the copyright in the Mickey Mouse property. There's also been a long battle over the interaction here of copyright and trademark. The grandson of Edgar Rice Burroughs, for instance, long made a living out of his grandfathers' properties even after copyright waned by registering Tarzan and Jon Carter as trade marks. (Surely a breach of the old US concept of 'abuse of copyright'?). Seemed to work for some time, though in recent years international courts have shot down his right to control a character in which the copyright has lapsed with trade mark. Japan, in particular, did this - and around the same time, he settled a case he had taken in the US against someone on this very point perhaps fearing that a US court would find against him. Clearly there are big businesses, not least disney, who don't want to see mony disappear in smoke should other people be able to get their hands on The Mouse and such, but on the other hand what we have seen this way has been the restriking of the copyright bargain, with the public domain losing out to the financial interests of those who come long after the original creative - hardly the founding notion of the right extending for a limited period beyond death in order to provide for surviving dependents....

 

[scottyrocks]

I went through this in the early '70s, and it continued, in different incarnations, through the late '90s.

Band t-shirts were big. They proclaimed alliegence (and worship) of a group and/or style of music. Then there were the T's with questionable graphics on them. I had a couple that I kept out of my parents' eyesight, and definitely didn't wear to school. Both had to do with 'The Act.'

And then when I got into motorcycling, bike shirts (and hats) became the order of the day. I showed off, and was, what I rode. And then when I joined a riding 'organization,' that stuff worn with 'official club wear' was about as cool as it got.

It all seems so silly now.

 

[GHT]

Humans are nothing if not tribal. Even those of us who, reject the mainstream, have our tribes and our trophies (Imelda May summed it up wonderfully in Tribal - http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/imeldamay/tribal.html ).

And then when I got into motorcycling, bike shirts (and hats) became the order of the day. I showed off, and was, what I rode. And then when I joined a riding 'organization,' that stuff worn with 'official club wear' was about as cool as it got.

It all seems so silly now.

Is really, all so silly? Edward hit the nail with his 'tribal' remark and Scotty, more or less reiterated that with his comment about: 'Official Club Wear.'

You have to be very strong indeed, at the impressionable age, that is pubescent to early twenties, not to be influenced by peer pressure. Most of that pressure is self induced, the need to belong, or as Edward described it, tribal. Wearing the same as, or even outdoing, your peers is what it's all about, official club wear, as Scotty so eloquently put it. How else would an acronym like FCUK become mainstream? The company argued that it was simply their trading initials: French Connection UK. Believe that and you believe in the tooth fairy.

 

[Fading Fast]

In general, I see it as all harmless. If nobody wanted to wear a band, sport team, cartoon character t-shirt, etc., then there'd be no money to be made and it would end tomorrow. I don't see it as a human failing if a lot of people want to wear a shirt, etc. that announces their support for something nor do I see it as some insidious plot by a company when they market this stuff.

As to the graphic, profane, etc., that is, IMHO, part of the larger cultural shift to accepting what used to be considered unacceptable behavior, words, etc. and was not driven by the t-shirt, etc. The cultural shift is the cause; the t-shirt, etc. is the effect.

The copyright / trademark stuff is intellectually or legally interesting because there is no, IMHO, absolute right or wrong about 20 years or 50 years or one or two generations or those alive at the time, etc. Instead, it's all about an arbitrary balance of individual ownership rights and societal benefits.

Unfortunately, we need rules that can be applied, but the individual situations can be very different. Is it fair for Disney, who clearly has invested a lot of time, money, energy and corporate identity in Mickey Mouse (and has made a lot of money from MM as well), to simply lose ownership of MM because a certain amount of time has past? Maybe. Is it right for the great grandson of the a one-hit wonder who has Parkinson disease to struggle to pay his bills while a bunch of anonymous companies make money from the single that is now in the public domain? Maybe. Should Shakespeare's decedents (if they could be identified) have ownership of his writing five hundred years after he wrote them? Probably not - don't know where the line is, but almost certainly, it's shy of 500 years.

There are no easy answers to these issues, IMHO, as each situation has its own facts and circumstances, but again, we need rules set before hand or all our laws will be arbitrary and that model is not sustainable.