A New Exhibition Celebrates The T-Shirt’s Political Power

The humble T-shirt will take centre stage in the Fashion and Textile Museum’s new major exhibition, T-shirt: Cult, Culture, Subversion, which opens on February 9th.

A collaboration between the Bermondsey museum and The Civic in Barnsley, it takes a comprehensive look at the evolution of the everyday wardrobe staple. From its conception as an undergarment for labourers in the 19th Century, to its first reference in popular culture in F Scott Fitzgerald’s 1920 novel This Side of Paradise and universal recognition on Marlon Brando in 1951’s A Streetcar Named Desire, over 100 examples of the everyday garment, alongside photographs and archival material, bring its history to life.

The narrative of the exhibition, however, is the T-shirt’s social-political power. As curator Dennis Nothdruft explains in a foreword, “It feels quite relevant… the matter of the personal as politicised. [The T-shirt] is a really basic way of telling the world who and what you are.”

Though it was Barbara Hulanicki who broke the status quo in Britain and started marketing the T-shirt as a fashionable garment in 1964, it was anti-war eco-warrior designer-campaigners Vivienne Westwood and Katherine Hamnett, who saw the potential of the T-shirt as a platform for political messaging. The exhibition will house a private collection of Vivienne Westwood T-shirts from the early days of "Let it Rock", "Sex", and "Seditionaries", through to recent collections, such as "Active Resistance", "Propaganda" and "Climate Revolution".

Maria Grazia Chiuri's now-ubiquitous “We should all be feminists” T-shirt, from her debut Dior collection, also vies for attention. Sitting alongside Westwood's designs, it shows that the T-shirt, in its simplest form, is still a relevant form of democratic self-expression. As Sarah Mower wrote in the February issue of Vogue, "as the lids are blown off in all directions on sexual harassment, racial injustice, gender pay inequality, the rolling back of women's rights, the gap between rich and poor... fashion (or clothing; we can debate what we should call it) isn't on the sidelines in this: it's a constant ally in times of trouble, a medium open to infinite nuances of meaning in the hands of ingenious people to show their beliefs."

Visit "T-shirt: Cult, Culture, Subversion" at the Fashion and Textile Museum from February 9th – May 6th 2018.