T-shirt or not t-shirt

What’s funny — and not funny-ha-ha so much as funny-huh — about the t-shirt here at the workshop is that, well, it isn’t really a t-shirt at all.

Or rather, it is a t-shirt, technically, if you blithely ignore almost all the substance. It has short sleeves, yes. An (almost) round neck, sure. But beyond that, it goes its own way. In fact, it is probably closer to what the t-shirt might have been had history taken a different turn — if, say, in 1870 or maybe 1951, something had nudged it down a path not of mass production and global ubiquity, but of making on a smaller scale, and unassuming quality.

That more or less sums up the t-shirt. A sort of alternate-universe t-shirt. It has been an offering for about four years now — and for all about four, the same question is asked, “Is it a t-shirt or is it not a t-shirt?” (The answer is yes.) Because this is what the t-shirt might look like if it had never become the flimsy, triple-pack, auto-assembled thing everyone thinks of when they hear the word. If, instead, it had become a hand-framed, fully-fashioned short-sleeve article of wear made with surprising care and substantial cotton.

The cotton, see, is ring-spun and thick — a heftier sort of material than what usually finds its way into a t-shirt, which, in the hands of the knitter who makes it, balances breathability and structure. It is cut short, and is shaped with taper in the body, coming in at the hem with a long rib section. Tailored might be too strong a word, but is not entirely wrong: the t-shirt is fully fashioned so every panel is shaped, and it is thus a t-shirt which holds its silhouette, washes without fuss, and does not immediately surrender to slouch.

There are a few details which make it even more alien to modern t-shirts. The peculiar overlapping neck detail, for one — a small touch, which lends strength, character, and a clear point of departure from the usual ribbed crew collar. Then there are the side splits in the hem, which do the dual job of adding comfort and ease of movement, emphasising the deliberate shortness of the cut, but also helping it break cleanly over shorts or trousers.

It is a t-shirt, then — if you want it to be. But perhaps better to think of it as thought experiment in how history might have gone if the world went another way. A t-shirt not of standardisation but of hand and eye; one from a universe in which automation stalled sometime in the twentieth century, and the words “fast fashion” never came into being.