The basic white cotton T-shirt, shaped like the 20th letter of the alphabet, was introduced around the time of World War I by either the British Navy or the French Army, depending on which historian you consult. In any event, American servicemen quickly adopted the T as a comfortable lightweight layer to protect tender skin from scratchy wool uniforms, and by the 1930s retailers like Hanes, Fruit of the Loom, and Sears Roebuck were selling T-shirts as underwear to the public. After World War II, when returning U.S. troops began wearing their undershirts as outerwear, the T-shirt became a wardrobe staple, jumping into the American fashion mainstream practically overnight. Then, in the 1950s, the simple, close-fitting white T saw a huge boost in popularity when Hollywood actors Marlon Brando, Paul Newman and James Dean fired up their onscreen sex appeal in this suddenly very modern-looking bit of apparel.

The democratic appeal of the T-shirt has only grown stronger over time. T-shirt design continued to advance during the volatile 1960s when Ts joined the protest poster and handout flyer as part of the vocabulary of dissent; suddenly it was chic to wear your message on your chest. The 1970s saw the rise of the concert T-shirt as a way to advertise a wearer's love for a favorite band, and during the '80s Don Johnson rocked a T-shirt under his Armani suit jacket on the popular TV show Miami Vice. Today, limited edition handmade artists' Ts are a means of personal expression—a pop culture phenomenon, worn by everyone from students to celebrities. Collectible yet accessible, inexpensive and easy to acquire, they are art within everyone's reach.

Perhaps as a reaction to the wealth of well-designed but nevertheless mass-market T-shirts on offer at retailers such as Urban Outfitters, people are beginning to seek out more original wearable artwork. The trend reflects an overall renewed interest in unique handcrafted items in our ever-more-technical world. Type "custom T-shirts" into the search box on Etsy.com, the online marketplace for handmade creations, and you get more than 25,000 hits. "Independent artists now have an opportunity to go as wild as they want to in the process of carving out a niche," says Chappell Ellison, a 2010 graduate of SVA's D-Crit MFA program who blogs for Etsy. "And do-it-yourself screen printing kits are even available at Wal-Mart, proof that T-shirt printing has been truly democratized to an affordable level. The rise in availability of cheap, plain T-shirts has really bolstered the independent artist looking to get his or her graphics onto wearable items."

Printmaker and illustrator Dominick Rapone is the founder of Beastly Prints Artist Editions and the manager of the print shop at the School of Visual Arts BFA Fine Arts Department. Rapone sells limited edition T-shirts based on his fine art prints—19th-century engravings of sea life, anatomical diagrams, skulls and botanicals collaged together into surreal-feeling mash-ups. The delicate shirt designs, with a macabre sense of humor, transcribe his work directly into a portable format with nothing lost in the jump from fine art to wearable goods.

T-shirt design by Jeffrey Everett

Many beginning T-shirt artists use competition websites like Threadless (where viewers vote for their favorite designs and the winning designer gets a contract to produce and sell the shirts), as well as TeeFury, Design by Humans and Imperfect Articles as jumping-off points to start a business. "There's a built-in community and social media aspect to these sites that give a helpful creative push to an artist—seeing what other designers are up to can improve the quality of the product," Rapone says. "And once they've had some success, artists can move on to more individual venues like Etsy or their own website to sell the designs exclusively." 

The ability to quickly produce a design in direct response to an event has also added to the rising popularity of artists' Ts over the last few years. Rapone recalls one SVA student who rushed into the print studio on the morning Michael Jackson's death was announced. She cranked out 50 memorial T-shirts, set up a small table outside of the Apollo Theater on 125th Street in Manhattan that afternoon, and sold out by that evening.

The immediacy of the production process appeals to artist M. Tony Peralta. Peralta took a number of continuing ed classes in printmaking at SVA when he realized silk screening would allow him to quickly distribute his work to a wider audience. After an overwhelmingly positive reaction to his painting Gaza Strip (aka Freedom) in a 2004 group show, Peralta screened the image onto T-shirts and sold them in New York street wear boutiques like Vault and The Brooklyn Circus. His Ts are art as politics in the best protest tradition—not content to be simply good-looking, they're confrontational shirts with a message. "My art is socially conscious and very direct because I don't know how to B.S.," he says. His most recent project, Complejo (not appearing on T-shirts as yet, though he's considering it), takes a hard look at what it means to be Afro-Latino in America today. For inspiration, Peralta draws on a diverse group of artists, including Frida Kahlo, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Shepherd Fairey and Keith Haring, and his Ts address subjects ranging from the "theft" of Manhattan from the Lenape Indians in the 17th century to the current gentrification of uptown Manhattan. His work has a bold street-graphic quality—the anti-gentrification T shows two pistols with their barrels crossed in an X, centered within the slogan "Defend Uptown."

Freelance artist and screen printer Jessica Crosby, who graduated from SVA's BFA Illustration Department in 2001, generates ideas for her decorative pattern-driven T-shirts from a very different starting point. Her inspiration comes from small-run, hand-printed artists' books (especially from The NY Art Book Fair held annually at MoMA PS1, the Museum of Modern Art's outpost in Queens) as well as from her travels to far-flung places around the globe. "On a recent trip to Istanbul and Abu Dhabi, I picked up a lot of pattern and graphic inspiration," Crosby says. "It was amazing to be in mosques and palaces that dated back to the 1500s, seeing the Iznik tiles, the rugs and tapestries, the patterns and colors, and think about how to apply all of that to something new." She uses discharge inks—similar to bleach, they remove color from the background fabric instead of adding a layer of pigment—to create a soft, well-worn feel that makes her Ts seem vintage instead of brand-new.

Jeffrey Everett, who graduated in 2004 from the MFA in Design program, started his company El Jefe Design in 2003 to produce T-shirts as his senior thesis project. El Jefe has evolved into a multidisciplinary firm that has won multiple awards from the AIGA and the Art Directors Club. Current projects for a wide variety of entertainment, corporate and nonprofit clients include band posters and, yes, T-shirts. For his master's thesis, Everett wanted something he could produce, complete and distribute in the limited amount of time available. He also sought to create a tongue-in-cheek, no-brand brand; something funny and cute without a serious message. So he created T-shirts based on "lorem ipsum," the nonsensical placeholder Latin-ish text familiar to every graphic designer. Everett sold all of the shirts by offering them at a variety of stores in New York and Boston, at his graduating class's group thesis show and online, and recouped his entire $3,000 investment for printing and supplies.

The top shirt in anyone's collection is likely to be the one whose message or design is closest to the wearer's heart. Everett's favorite is a concert shirt for the long-defunct, post-punk band Joy Division that he bought at Newbury Comics in Boston. He recalls: "I was 16 and had only been to a few concerts, and had never heard of Joy Division, but once I had the T-shirt, I went back and bought the album. And then I was like, wow, this band is so cool—and the shirt graphic captured the music perfectly." Jessica Crosby's most-cherished shirt is a Stevie Nicks 1986 tour T that she found under a rack in a vintage shop, complete with filthy footprint where someone had trampled on it. This writer still treasures a Ramones T-shirt from the early 1980s—not the knock-off version still available at malls across the U.S., but the genuine article from a show at the now-shuttered Manhattan rock club CBGBs. Knit cotton wasn't meant to last for 30 years; the shirt is worn almost to the point of transparency, rendering it unworthy to be seen in polite company. For its next incarnation, maybe it will take a trip to San Francisco, where artist Ben Venom extends the life of old heavy metal and punk T-shirts by sewing them into quilts. The popularity of the graphic T seems inexhaustible, and for good reason—this versatile bit of clothing gives its wearer a stylish forum to make a political statement, crack a joke, shake things up, or express support for a favorite band or artist. That's quite a journey: from military underwear to cultural icon in just a few decades. ∞