The world's oldest preserved garment,
discovered by Flinders Petrie, is a "highly sophisticated" linen shirt
from a First Dynasty Egyptian tomb at Tarkan, ca. 3000B.C. : "the
shoulders and sleeves have been finely pleated to give form-fitting
trimness while allowing the wearer room to move. The small fringe
formed during weaving along one edge of the cloth has been placed by
the designer to decorate the neck opening and side seam."
The shirt was an item of men's underwear until the twentieth century.
Although the woman's chemise was a closely related garment to the
man's[3], it is the man's garment that became the modern shirt. In the
middle ages it was a plain, undyed garment worn next to the skin and
under regular garments. In medieval artworks, the shirt is only visible
(uncovered) on humble characters, such as shepherds, prisoners, and
penitents. In the seventeenth century men's shirts were allowed to
show, with much the same erotic import as visible underwear today. In
the eighteenth century, instead of underpants, men "relied on the long
tails of shirts ... to serve the function of drawers. Eighteenth
century costume historian Joseph Strutt believed that men who did not
wear shirts to bed were indecent. Even as late as 1879, a
visible shirt with nothing over it was considered improper.
The shirt sometimes had frills at the neck or cuffs. In the sixteenth
century, men's shirts often had embroidery, and sometimes frills or
lace at the neck and cuffs,[9] and through the eighteenth century long
neck frills, or jabots, were fashionable.Colored shirts begin to appear
in the early nineteenth century, as can be seen in the paintings of
George Caleb Bingham. They were considered casual wear, for lower class
workers only, until the twentieth century. For a gentleman, "to wear a
sky-blue shirt was unthinkable in 1860 but had become standard by 1920
and, in 1980, constituted the most commonplace event."
European and American women began wearing shirts in 1861, when the
"Garibaldi Blouse", a red shirt as worn by the freedom fighters under
Giuseppe Garibaldi, became fashionable.