And you thought t-shirts weren’t an important part of American history.

Nine-one percent of Americans say they have a “favorite T-shirt.”

That, of course, is not a big deal… I have a favorite pair of socks, shoes, and even a salad fork.

But there’s more to the jersey than meets the eye. There is important history and economics.

The first promotional T-shirt for a movie was printed in 1939. That movie was “The Wizard Of

Oz”. Like the movie, the t-shirt did quite well. We make our own version of a Wizard of Oz t-shirt, I imagine a little different than the first image, which shows a cartoon of the gang walking down the road of yellow brick and Toto is raising one hind leg Caption reads: ‘How the yellow brick road got its name’.

The t-shirts represent a major American economy. Cotton is still a big industry in this country, particularly in the southern states. It takes six miles of thread to make a T-shirt. One acre of cotton is enough to produce 1,200 tees.

Have you ever wondered if the t-shirt business is viable? How about this for a statistic? Around two billion t-shirts are sold annually around the world.

The Salvation Army receives millions of t-shirt donations annually which are then auctioned off by the pound to third world countries.

If one likes T-shirt history, the Smithsonian displays the oldest printed T-shirt on record that simply reads, “Dew-It With Dewey.” Dew what I wonder? Hmm.

In the 1950 play “A Streetcar Named Desire,” Brando’s T-shirt and jeans were tailored to be form-fitting and fully showcase his physique.

However, the word t-shirt did not become an official word until the 1920s, when it was included in Webster’s dictionary.

More than $8 million worth of Farrah Fawcett T-shirts were sold in 1977 when she appeared in Charlie’s Angels.

And speaking of sexy t-shirts, have you ever wondered what sparked the “wet t-shirt contest”? She started after Jacqueline Bisset’s appearance in the movie “The Deep” in which she swims underwater and then surfaces, wearing a white T-shirt and a topless bikini.

The most popular form of designer t-shirts today are screen-printed. But digital reproductions are becoming very popular and they blend into the fabric and have a more “real” look to me than a decal look, but of course it’s a matter of taste. I decided to make both, since different people like different looks.

Americans love our t-shirts. A survey conducted several years ago shows that more than 62% of the US (all ages) own at least 10 t-shirts and the 18-24 demographic owns more than 10 t-shirts and 19% owns more than 30 Tshirts. So it doesn’t look like they’re going out of style any time soon.