The History of Jeans, T-shirts, and Hoodies: Time Travel 101

Hello everyone and welcome back. Today we're going to be doing a little bit of time travel, which is to say that we technically pretty much do some time travel for every video, but specifically today we're going to be talking about time travel. I don't know if you've ever had some of these articles come across to your feet before, but I had one recently that I see pretty often talking about how clearly they have all these pictures or even videos of people who are time traveling. And usually it tends to be old photographs of people either holding an object that is roughly the size and shape of a cell phone or perhaps holding their hand to their ear. Obviously the really simple answer is there are lots of things that happen to be roughly that size and shape, like notepads or small books, any number of other things. But the one that caught my is an image from 1941. It's a photograph that was taken at the South Fork Bridge reopening in British Columbia, and the claim is that of course this particular gentleman who stands out from the crowd is actually a time traveler. Well I'm not even going to get into belief of any of that sort of possibility, but we are going to spend some time taking a look at his outfit, understanding why he really looks so different from the rest of the lot, looking more specifically at some of the basic elements that are in our modern closet today and how far back they go. Things like jeans, t-shirts, hoodies. What is the history of these garments? How far back would we as a modern person have to go in time before we really stop seeing things that are familiar to us, that we ourselves own? Because presenting the idea of how far back could someone go in time before they're noticeable depends on so many factors like who the person is, where they ended up, just do they as a person fit into that place, let alone does their clothing and did they suddenly show up in the palace garden or did they show up in a working neighborhood, in a industrial complex, in a major city? Like it's just obviously there's so many context issues with the whole thing, but looking at it through our viewpoint, how far back before things are completely unfamiliar, I think is a little bit more interesting. So we're going to be looking at the origins of the garments that you see this gentleman wearing, of some of the basic things that we have in our wardrobe, and really digging into that. Interestingly enough, the idea of time travel is relatively new, which I didn't realize how recent it was. So time travel in the sense of we're getting into a time travel machine and going backwards or forwards is something that obviously has been a large part of my childhood and existence. It's been around for as long as I've known, you know, back to the future and all that, but in reality it didn't really pick up as a normal cultural thing until the late 19th century. One of the major writings was of course The Time Machine by H.G. Wells in 1895, and while there are a few stories that talk about say a clock that travels people back and forth in time or other time machine type things from around the same time, that's really the big one that set it off being a more normal discussion point and something in our cultural concept. Prior to that, time travel tended to be less of an intentional thing and less of a people suddenly bursting back in time, but instead was revolving around people, say, falling asleep and then dreaming of being in a different time or place and then waking up and not knowing if it was a really vivid dream or if it actually really happened. Great example of that of course is A Christmas Carol. He goes both backwards and forwards in time but then wakes up at the end. So it's a little bit difficult to judge that those are quite the same because a lot of those stories the person isn't notably out of their time by the other era. They're sometimes even not visible to the other people. So not quite the same as what we're seeing with the claims in the photographs and things that we're used to in modern day. You go back even further and some of the earlier versions of sort of time travel tend to involve somebody falling asleep and waking up an excessive amount of time later. They thought they fell asleep for three hours but in reality it was 300 years. I mean the rip-run-winkle idea is pretty interestingly universal across many different cultures. This is not one specific area that has the story. There are so many stories just like this across time and around the world and that tends to be the most common thing similar to time travel. A lot of times those characters fall back asleep and wake back up where they originally were, again leaving them to wonder if it was a dream or not. But I feel like this brings us really well into the sponsor of the video for this week, Birch Living. Because really who wouldn't love to have a sleep so deep it feels like 300 years past. I am admittedly a very light sleeper and I'm not on the best of terms with muscle aches and pains. Between filming and the physical work I do every day, I really rely on a good mattress to keep me functioning every day. Which is why I've been so excited to work with Birch. 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If you don't, they'll pick it up for you, and you'll get a full refund. The mattress arrives at your door rolled up in a box with free shipping in the US, and it was so easy to set up, and exciting to unroll and watch it expand. I love my Birch mattress, and I think you would too. If you're looking for a new bed, check out Birch. You can click the link below or go to birchliving.com slash nicole rudolph to get $400 off your mattress plus two free pillows. Thanks again to Birch Living for sponsoring this week's video, and now let's get back to that photograph. So the obvious reason that we can see this as a modern person amidst a historic image is the fact that he is dressed so incredibly differently. It's very casual in comparison to the fact that every other person around him is dressed pretty uniformly. All of the men tend to be in a very similar suit. Some have hats, some don't, but it's really consistent for the people that we can see. Comparison to this man in sunglasses, what looks like a printed t-shirt, and a zip-up sweater. We obviously can't see what he's wearing on his lower half, but if he is a time traveler, it's probably a pair of jeans, right? So I thought it'd be interesting to look at the history of t-shirts, hoodies, and jeans, because I have already done a little bit on the history of trousers, pants, pantaloons, all of that stuff video there, but that just kind of gave a general overview for when we moved from breeches to trousers. As of the 1790s, trousers became less of a working class garment, more of an everyday garment, and by the 1830s, they're just kind of what most people in America and the UK and Europe wore, like it just was a very normal garment by that point in time. But jeans have a very different history. We have two stories to tell. We have jean, and we have denim. Nowadays, we think of jeans being made out of denim, but that's not the way that it started. Historically, both jean and denim are types of fabric. They are specific weaves and fiber contents of textiles. In the case of jean cloth, it comes from Genoa, Italy, so a lot of times fabric is named for the region that it's from. This is a great example of that case, and this is a sturdy cloth that is usually linen, cotton mix. It's really similar to fush chin, and it's a heavy twill weave. It's a very sturdy working cloth, and denim is very similar. In fact, most of the references I could find mention that it's a little bit heavier or a little bit higher quality, but they're really similar. And in this case, it starts off coming from Nîmes, France, de Nîmes, and it tends to be woolen based, and eventually becomes wool and cotton, and eventually cotton. So there's a transition as to what sort of fibers we're dealing with here, but the cloth itself is still going to be very familiar to our modern eye. One of the wonderful things that I came across in doing research for this is this book, which is a book of art put together by someone who was trying to find as many examples of this one particular artist from the late 17th century who tended to paint very everyday scenes of really average people, and they all are seeming to wear denim in some format or another. Some of it even looks like the stonewashed denim that we're used to seeing in our jeans today. So this is something that historically goes really far back, but it is very much a working fabric. It is not meant for higher class fancier things. So you're going to see denim and jean cloth regularly used for workwear, for trousers. Sailors, or miners, or people who were doing labor in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, one of the reasons that we heavily associate it with the color blue is related to this. As we move into the 19th century, cotton becomes the preferred textile of choice in America because we're producing so much of it, and indigo is a crop that is regularly produced in America. It's something that is really color fast, so that bright blue won't bleach out in the sun or wash out really easily. You regularly see a lot of denim and jean also sold in bleached white, unbleached, natural tones up through brown, but blue seems to be really common as well. So it makes sense as these crops are becoming more popular, they're being utilized because one of the main uses of denim and jean in the 19th century is for laborers and enslaved people. So a lot of the plantations down the south that are already growing these crops are just simply turning around, having them produced into textiles, and then having them produced into clothing for the enslaved people that are on those sites. So it makes sense that that becomes sort of very typical appearance, color use of those textiles. As for the gradual change of blue jeans becoming an everyday thing, it took a while. Some of the really great primary sources I came across were from 1869 and 1876, two election years apparently, where the elections were being run between a typical politician and someone who was apparently decidedly not the typical politician. And they tended to refer to whoever this other person was as blue jean breeches or blue jean pantaloons as an insult, saying that this is a working class person, what are they doing here? They don't belong here. And it's just really showing how heavily associated blue jeans or jeans or denim, any of those things, were with working class, with laborers, people that were doing physical work. And that association is going to take some time to get over. The point that most jeans history really picks up tends to be in the 1870s with Levi, because that was the point where Levi moved out to San Francisco, started selling working class clothing to the local miners, and worked with a tailor who invented rivets for trousers in order to strengthen the weak points like around the pockets and belt loops and things like that. And they started putting those in and eventually filed for a patent for that in 1872. So that tends to be the history of where we really pick up on things being the invention of blue jeans, even though blue jean or denim had been used regularly for working class trousers for centuries at that point in time. But that was when it really started to be advertised as a singular specific thing, not just trousers that were made out of jean or denim, but specifically jeans. It did still take a while for the term a pair of jeans or referring to the garment itself as just jeans rather than jean breeches or whatever it is. And I started finding references in the 1890s utilizing a pair of jeans. The earliest one I found was 1893, but it could certainly be a little bit earlier than that. This is also the point where it starts becoming a little more normalized in society, where it's becoming potentially a little more than just a working class garment. As we move into the early 20th century, things start to get gradually more casual for most people, especially in America, and clothing follows that. So by the time we reach, say, the 1930s, jeans are being sold to middle class everyday Americans that are not doing physical labor. And it's usually being sold either for, you can use these for yard work or whatever it is that you're doing around your own home in terms of physical labor rather than for your job, but also as a sort of adventure. They're very often sold as being compared to cowboys and cowgirls, that you're going to take a vacation westward and wrangle some horses in your jeans. And this is an advertising ploy that they heavily lean into in the 1930s and 40s, and it's for both men and women at that point. Women have started to occasionally wear trousers by that time. There are some examples in the 19th century, but they tend to be very outside the norm, whether it's specifically for bicycle use or whether it's the dress reform movements. Women's trousers being an acceptable thing to just see and not specific to the circumstances that they are in only kind of develops more around the 1920s. So by the 1930s, advertising jeans to women would have been pretty acceptable, provided, of course, that people are wearing them in these more casual situations. It does take a while, though, for jeans to become more than the most extreme of casual. World War II, they get used by so many people for industrial purposes that a lot of people bring them back and keep them in their closets for similar things. But even throughout the 1950s and 60s, they're seen as an everyday item to be more of a resistance to the norm, a deviation from standard fashion and a statement that we tend to think of the, you know, young man in his white t-shirt, his jeans and leather jacket who's causing all the trouble in town. And that's the way that they were seen. It was something that was a chosen social proclamation at that time. But this starts to change in the 1960s, where this starts to become a more normal concept. More and more people are making that choice to be more casual, bucking the norm and getting out of the standard business attire and not following in that sort of path. So it becomes more normalized. 1970s, jeans become something for fashion. Lots of fashion houses start picking up, start producing their own line of jeans. And we just go from there into it being an everyday thing for most people to own a pair. It is definitely one of, if not the most common garments in the world. Circling back around to our photograph again, what we can see in it looks like he is wearing a printed t-shirt. I do admit that is not something he actually can be wearing, more likely than not. They didn't really exist at that time. There is definitely a much longer history to t-shirts that we're about to get into, but what he's probably wearing is actually not a t-shirt, it's a sweater. Sweaters are knitted with lots of different designs in them, whether they're stripes, zigzags, whatever it may be for that era. It's also fairly likely that he has on a striped sweater with a patch on the front. We tend to think of those collegiate sweaters that have whatever the school letter is on the front, and that could be what it is. The quality of the photo, of course, is not good enough for us to get that close and see whether they're stitching or knitting or anything else like that. But that's pretty likely what he's wearing. And the reason why it looks so jarring to us, in comparison to the rest of the people in the space, is that he's not wearing a collared shirt. He doesn't have anything on underneath it we can visibly see. And even if you look at advertisements of the era, and most of the examples of men in standard crew neck sweaters, they have a collared shirt on underneath pretty consistently. So that's what's really jarring to our eyes, more so than the garment itself, is the fact that it's missing a key point of what we think of as the vintage look. So if you are trying to dress more vintage without actually having to have a lot of vintage clothing, pro tip, collared shirts really common. But when it comes to the t-shirt, we can follow that back pretty far as well. In fact, knitted garments go back really far, but they really took off as a more common thing at the end of the 16th century when the knitting machine was invented. That's right, we had a machine to do knitting as a Queen Elizabeth's time. This is gonna go pretty far back. And while they were mostly doing stockings and a few other oddball things here and there with it, they didn't really figure out the best way to utilize large quantities of knit fabric until closer to the end of the 18th century for it to become kind of a normal thing to see in a wardrobe. But once they did, it started just to show up everywhere. And one of the early places that you regularly see it in the 19th century is that of undergarments. So under drawers, under shirts, the women's wear that goes underneath corset or even corset covers is regularly out of knitted textiles in this era. Abby did an entire video where she not only did the research on this, but actually reproduced one as well, and now swears by them. They look incredibly comfortable. Menswear had the same style of things where they had union suits and other sorts of combinations, separate drawers and shirts that were meant to be undergarments. You regularly start seeing mentions of undershirts and other undergarments like that as of the 1830s. The men's shirt tends to be considered the main undergarment. That's the thing that needs to get washed because you're sweating into it. It's protecting your clothing from you. And so that thing gets washed every single time you wear it, if not more often, ideally. And the undershirt is less there to be the thing that needs to be washed all the time and is more there to keep someone warm and dry. This is an era where they are exceedingly concerned about people being cold and damp because tuberculosis is a major issue and they think that's related. So making sure that you're always dry and warm is really important to them. And the best way to go about that is a wool knit underneath all of your other garments. Wool is really great at dealing with sweat and moisture. It stays feeling dry even when it really isn't. And it works well to insulate from heat as well as cold. So it's really great at temperature regulating both ways. So it's no surprise that they started to incorporate this into a regular list of things that men were wearing in the era. In fact, in 1862, the U.S. Navy had a knit wool undershirt as part of their standard lineup of uniform clothing for the sailors. So it was considered a normal thing. Now these aren't always short sleeve. A lot of times you're going to see ones that are full length sleeve and the neckline is a little bit different than we're used to in the fact that they aren't putting stretch material with a stretchy stitch around the neckline or for you to get that on off your head. Instead they are relying on stitching that to a solid fabric so it doesn't stretch out over time and putting a buttoned placket in front. So it resembles a modern henley just a little bit more than we tend to think of a t-shirt, but it is clearly a related garment to that era. And unlike some of the claims I saw that said that it was men cutting apart their union suits in order to have something to work in that was easier, these things existed as shirts the same time that full suits of this stuff existed. So you didn't have to cut it apart, not to say that some didn't, but it wasn't necessary. That didn't invent it. It just was an undershirt as of at least the 1830s. Similar to the undershirt, we also have the bathing suit. Bathing suit you will find from mid-century onwards really just resembles a pair of shorts and a t-shirt. It's usually still made out of wool because again that's the best thing to deal with water, but it looks pretty darn modern. In fact I even found another image that was claimed to be a different time traveler and he's just wearing a bathing suit. But as for the idea of t-shirt being an established concept and word, we have to look more towards the early 20th century. This is the point where sports are taking over, where it's really fashionable and trendy for people to take part in athletic activities. And along with that, athletic clothing has a really big boom. And one of the things that's a part of that? T-shirts. And while I'm sure the phrase dates earlier than the reference I found, I still found a reference from 1914 that was talking about baseball and says t-shirts. It's not in quotes, it doesn't have a definition with it, so theoretically that means it should have predecessors to it so we aren't having to explain it to people. It's not brand new as a term. I just didn't come across earlier ones, but I didn't exactly dig too deeply. So t-shirt is an established concept, an established term by the point that we reach the 19-teens, and it's becoming more regularly seen as an acceptable singular garment, as something that it's okay to see. Earlier on in the 19th century it is very much underwear. I actually came across this hilarious article, which paused to read, that talks about the Santa Cruz wild man that this other person ran into who appeared out of the woods wearing nothing but an undershirt. They do not explain whether or not this means he literally just had an undershirt on and no pants or anything else, or whether this means he just simply didn't have a shirt over it and jacket and all the things that would make it socially acceptable for him to be a normal person. I'm not sure which it is. It is an interesting story to record either way, but that's a great example of seeing someone in an undershirt without all the other accoutrement is not typical. Probably only for work wear, but sports angle makes it more popular and more common at the beginning of the 20th century, and no different than jeans pick up popularity in the 1930s, so do t-shirts. And t-shirts become more and more common throughout the 20th century, moving of course from sportswear and underwear to being everyday casual, to being just everyday. When it comes to screen printing, however, that has a more specific history. The actual idea of screen printing, the practice of it, dates honestly about a thousand years back to China. It is a very old practice and spread throughout lots of different regions by the time we reach the 20th century, but it wasn't commonly used in America or Europe until the 1930s. And you'll start to see screen printing being used from the 1930s onwards in art. It takes a little while longer for it to regularly show up on t-shirts though, and it starts not surprisingly being used in the 1960s on sports shirts, bowling shirts, baseball shirts, those sorts of things. And that's when the rotating screen printing machine that allows you to print multiple colors, multiple shirts at the same time, is patented in 1967. And by the time we reach the 1970s, printed t-shirts are just all the rage and they're absolutely everywhere. So of course this explains why it's not very likely that the man that we see in the picture in 1941 is wearing a screen printed t-shirt. It would be very unusual, but a sweater with either a design knitted into it or stitched on top of it would be really typical. As for what he's wearing for his overwear, that's really simple. You can look at even Sears catalogs from around 1940-41 and you're going to find tons of zip-up sweaters like that. It is a very common casual garment. So is this person pretty underdressed for this situation compared to everyone around him? Possibly. It just might be that he's younger, or his job is more casual, or just the group that he ended up being photographed with was all older, more traditional people. That does appear to be the case. But as for his sweater, his zip-up jacket style sweater, this again has its own specific history which leads us up to the hoodie of today. Sweaters were not something that you commonly see being worn in everyday situations well into the 19th century. Obviously, like I mentioned, these undershirts and undergarments that are wool knit that are held close to the skin in order to retain warmth certainly do exist, but wearing a sweater instead of a jacket is a pretty late thing. I came across some cardigan jackets that were knitted jackets for men, and there's some mentions throughout the rest of the century of those going in and out of style and starting to trade off with sweaters as to what is the popular trend for knitwear for men of the time. Knitwear for women also developing pretty similarly. One article mentioned that the sweater got really popular because of sports. It's an article from 1899, which again fits really well into that turn of the century athletic leisure wear invention that we were already looking at with the t-shirt. So this tends to be when the sweater really apparently took off as a specifically popular garment that we term sweater that looks like the sweater that we're used to. So we will launch ourselves into the 20th century seeing that. But we still have a few more factors to add to this. First off, the zipper. Because buttons were the more regular thing in the 19th century, and at some point we added a zipper to this. The history of the zipper is a very mixed one. There's a lot of work in order to create something that resembles our modern zipper. The clasp locker was invented in 1893, and that's pretty close to our modern zipper, but it was used mostly for shoes and other hard leather items like that rather than on clothing. It wasn't even regularly used on clothing until the 19-teens, 1920s, and that really started off more with military wear. It became a pretty popular thing to use for military wear in World War I, but it still took a little while for it to make its way out of industrial wear into everyday wear. It was advertised as great for children's wear in the 1930s and became suddenly really popular. There are all these weird 1930s women's garments with just zippers all over them because it's like, look, new thing! And so zippers really took off at that point in time. As for the name zipper, that's from 1923. B.F. Goodrich started titling their specific invention the zipper or the zip, and that's where we get that terminology from. So another great example of a brand name essentially that just has become the normal thing, rather than calling them slide fasteners or clasp lockers or a multitude of terms prior to that point. As for adding hoods to this, while the man in the picture does not have a hood, this is a regular thing in our own closets today, so I thought it would be great to explore that. Sweatshirts, also a common thing picking up in the early part of the century because of athletic attire, and hooded sweatshirts are something that you do see plenty of mentions of. I found lots in the 1930s of hooded sweatshirts, usually specifically for sportswear. However, the term hoodie seems to be an early 90s thing. The earliest reference that I came across was from 1993, and it still put hoodie in quotation marks, and it was seeming to discuss slang from California teenagers who were part of a specific group that wore Ralph Lauren polo outfits and like all sorts of stuff that went with it. But hoodie seems to be more of an early 1990s terminology, even if the idea of a zip-up and hooded sweatshirt or sweater dates probably more so to the 1930s and onwards in terms of regular wear and use. So all of this is to say that the modern clothing that we're used to seeing usually can go pretty far back, even if it may not be in the format that we're used to seeing it today, or in the combination, or more importantly the usage that we are used to seeing it today. It has deep roots. We need a lot of inventions and a lot of cultural shifts in order to get to the point that we are at today, because we are wearing incredibly casual clothing in comparison to the past. That's really one of the things as modern people that we notice the most about older clothing, how not casual it feels, how very formal and over the top and full of too many layers and too many things in comparison to our very laid-back and casual appearance today. And that casual shift really does start in the early 20th century, so it's been around and growing rapidly for well over a century at this point. It's not a new concept, it's just really taken a hold of things, but you could still go pretty far back and see things that are familiar to us. Things like a simple pair of trousers, or a button-down shirt, or a really simple midi skirt, or anything else like that. You can easily go back a century or two before things start to look unfamiliar and change. But even then, fashion is a slow growth and change, even with all of its really fast ebb and flow with trends and colors and designs and patterns. The general styles and the way that we use them tends to be a much slower pace, so we're finding that the things that we wear every day in our closet today have actually been around for hundreds of years. It just wasn't an everyday item for everyone, or at the very least it wasn't a fashionable item until recently.