The Fashionable T-Shirt 1973
August 17, 1973 – New York: T-shirt collectors vie to outdo each other. Nancy Greenberg wears gaudy New York souvenir shirt. What mother never told Kathleen O’Connell about is Ultra-Brite toothpaste. French Gitanes shirt worn by Paula Scher is more desirable than American brands; photos: Nancy Moran / New Yoik Times
August 17, 1973 – New York: Jean-Louis Hym’s Liberation shirt from Paris proclaims underground paper. Joel Handrroff, an artist, is not a country music fan, but he likes the shirt because of the black-on-yellow color scheme. Barry Levine’s extols Automotive High School. photo: Nancy Moran / New York Times
Fashions may change, but t-shirts have remained a staple of young people for more than half a century as evidenced by these photographs of young New Yorkers taken in 1973.
If you are wondering what a standard t-shirt cost in the early seventies, generally it was $1.98 for a regular t-shirt and $2.98 for a deluxe heavier cotton. Specialty t-shirts cost more.
Below are some excerpts from the accompanying New York Times story by Angela Taylor:
NEW YORK — The T-shirt is of itself nothing but a knitted cotton affair whose ancestor is an undershirt. “It’s a non fashion,” says Anne Drew Fox, an artist who designs t-shirts. “All it does is cover you. What’s interesting about it is the message it communicates.”
The T-shirt, then, is a medium for a message and fads in messages come and go. First, there were the college or high school – shirts (a current Parisian fad is wearing American college shirts) and the team shirts bought by fans for their children at sports events. Later came the “intellectual” shirts starring Bach, Beethoven or Brahms. The 1960’s ‘brought a wave of peace movement shirts: protest slogans, upside-down flags.
Concurrently, there were the ‘commercial shirts, promoting beer or bagels or hot dogs, rock
groups and movies and disc jockeys. It was camp to wear a movie star shirt printed with the picture: of Marilyn Monroe or Humphrey Bogart.…This summer’s shirts have gone from camp to pure corn. It’s chic to wear a souvenir shirt—New York City’s, for instance, gaudily emblazoned with the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building, which sells for about $2 in the Times Square shooting galleries and variety stores. It’s upsmanship among the “in” people to have a souvenir shirt from an “out” resort: Miami Beach or Atlantic City, or one that says “New Jersey (or Virginia) is for lovers.”
….Collectors are strong on childhood shirts. Mickey Mouse is big again (one gets. extra points if it was bought in Disneyland), and so are Cub Scout shirts. Fans haunt thrift shops for treasures such as Davy Crockett or Hopalong Cassidy shirts from the 1940’s. Part of the game is paying as little as possible for a shirt—a 25-cent number from a thrift shop means more to a collector than the $10 ones from department stores, while the $40, rhinestone-emblazoned affair is considered nouveau riche.
