More about t-shirts

Expressive messages

Since the 1980s, T-shirts have flourished as a form of personal expression.

Screen printed T-shirts have been a standard form of marketing for major consumer products, such as Coca-cola and Mickey Mouse, since the 1970s. However, since the 1990s, it has become common practice for companies of all sizes to produce T-shirts with their corporate logos or messages as part of their overall advertising campaigns. Since the late 1980s and especially the 1990s, T-shirts with prominent designer-name logos have become popular, especially with teenagers and young adults.

These garments allow consumers to flaunt their taste for designer brands in an inexpensive way, in addition to being decorative. Examples of designer T-shirt branding include Calvin Klein, FUBU, Ralph Lauren and The Gap. These examples also include representations of rock bands, among other obscure pop-culture references. Licensed T-shirts are also extremely popular. Movie and TV T-shirts can have images of the actors, logos and funny quotes from the movie or TV show. Often, the most popular T-shirts are those that characters wore in the film itself (e.g., Bubba Gump from Forest Gump and Vote For Pedro from Napoleon Dynamite).

Designer Katharine Hamnett in the early 1980s pioneered outsize T-shirts with large-print slogans. The early first decade of the 21st century saw the renewed popularity of T-shirts with slogans and designs with a strong inclination to the humorous and/or ironic. The trend has only increased later in this decade; embraced by celebrities, such as Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, and reflected back on them, too ('Team Aniston').
The political and social statements that T-shirts often display have become, since the first decade of the 21st century, one of the reasons that they have so deeply permeated different levels of culture and society.

The statements also may be found to be offensive, shocking or pornographic to some. Many different organizations have caught on to the statement-making trend, including chain and independent stores, websites, and schools.
A popular phrase on the front of T-shirts demonstrating T-shirts' popularity among tourists is the humorous phrase "I did _____ and all I got was this lousy T-shirt." Examples include "My parents went to Las Vegas and all I got was this lousy T-shirt."
T-shirt exchange is an activity where people trade their T-shirts they are wearing. Some designs specifically write on the shirt "trade with me"

Environmental impact

A life cycle study of one T-shirt brand shows that the CO₂ emissions from a T-shirt is about 4 kilograms (8.8 pounds) -- including the growing of the cotton, manufacturing and wholesale distribution. The loss of natural habitat potential from the T-shirt is estimated to be 10.8 square meters (116 square feet).

Football shirts

A F.C. Barcelona football shirt.

Replica football shirts, normally replicas of the sports shirts worn by sportsmen, are commonly found in the football (soccer) market, with increased popularity after the commercialisation of football in the 1990s. With the rise of advertising in the mid 20th century, sponsors' logos began to appear on the shirts, and replica strips were made available for fans to purchase, generating significant amounts of revenue for clubs.
In the United Kingdom, several clubs have been accused of price fixing, and Manchester United were in fact fined in 2003. The high prices, and the fact that new designs are brought out each season for many clubs, mean that shirts are often the subject of satire among football fans, but many still consider it an obligation to wear them. Newcastle United and Manchester United fans for example have a famously high take-up rate on their clubs black and white striped and red and white shirts respectively. The prices have also led to many fans buying fake shirts which are imported into the UK from Thailand, Malaysia and Far East Asia; many sellers on eBay now indicate that their shirt are real rather than fake
Football players and fans wear this form of T-shirt that carries the team colours as a singe of their team loyalties. These tops are of a major personal and sentimental value to those supporters and the players who were them. Football players are obliged to wear them on the pitch and during the game itsself as a means of in-game identification of their team affiliation.

World Records

Nick Umbs t-shirts record stunt. Georgetown, Washington, DC. 2007

Nick Umbs of Burke, Virginia broke the U.S. record for most T-shirts worn at one time. Nick donned 183 T-shirts between sizes small and 10XL during a six-hour session in October 2007. Nick's record-breaking stunt was recorded by the Discovery Channel for the hit show "Is It True?".

Gallery

The home shirt of Olympique de Marseille for the 2006–07 season.

A T-shirt promoting the Swedish Language Wikipedia.