Contributed by Nilani Mathur
When you think of a graphic tee, you might think of concert merchandise, or the ones you get in a university gift shop, or maybe you think of the kind that high fashion brands are selling now. Graphic tees, however, originated in World War II and have been around for nearly a century. Surprisingly, fashion brands adopted and began selling this style at the latter end. Today, brands like Chanel, Louis Vuitton, and Enfants Riches Deprimes are selling their graphic tees for anywhere from $800 to $3,000. So how did the graphic tee go from military signifier to educational, taste, or luxury signifier, and what enduring significance do they hold?
Enfants Riches Deprimes "The Dream that Won't go Away" Shirt in Xerox Blue selling for $980
Chanel 2021 Graphic Print T-Shirt selling on The Real Real for $1,095
Naturally, before the graphic tee, there was the t-shirt, originating in the late 1800s and popularized by actors like Marlon Brando and James Dean in the 1950s. By then, they had become a mainstream clothing item, often fashioned by men as an undergarment or as athletic gear. This ubiquity led to the United States military’s distribution of the shirts among soldiers in training units. According to Heddles, “being notoriously prideful, soldiers took to decorating their t-shirts with custom-designed logos and lettering to represent their units, bases, ships (in the case of the navy), and deployments. These graphics were applied with paint and stencil, a practice that the military had used for decades to mark everything from footlockers to vehicles.”
Mainstream attention for the graphic look ignited after a 1942 Life Magazine cover featured a soldier at the Army Air Corps Gunnery School wearing a white tee with a winged horned toad logo. The emphasized “AIR CORP” and “GUNNERY SCHOOL” text alongside the soldier’s patriotically evocative disposition helped propel printed tees into popular culture.
Marlon Brando in 'A Streetcar Named Desire" (1951)
Life Magazine (1942)
Nonetheless, it wasn’t until the invention of the screenprinting machine in the 1960s that graphic tees took on expansive cultural significance. Their cost of production shrank while their accessibility swelled, democratizing the garment as an outlet for explicit self-expression. The expression of the time often concerned protest, politics, and the counterculture movement, whether it was through graphics, slogans, keywords, or a fusion of those things screenprinted on the t-shirt. For instance, the graphic tees worn at the 1969 Harvard University demonstration, spelling “STRIKE” across a crimson fist on the back.
Graphic Tee worn at the 1969 Harvard University Demonstration
The emergence of Pop Art and band graphics ensued during the same time frame, characterized by artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, as well as music groups like Pink Floyd and The Rolling Stones. Most concert t-shirts sold for around two to five US dollars at the time; adjusted for inflation, that’s roughly eighteen to forty-five dollars today, depending on the year. Not every concert had official merch—especially in the early ’60s. The Beatles, for example, had limited official t-shirt sales during their peak touring years, though many fans made their own tees or bought unofficial ones from street vendors, commonly at lower prices.
80s Andy Warhol "Marsha P. Johnson" Graphic Tee
The Rolling Stones Official Vintage 70s Logo T-Shirt
The sale and presence of graphic band tees continued to flourish in the 80s. In light of the licensing boom, the introduction of TV show, film, and sport imagery rendered the graphic tee a mainstream clothing choice. Purchasing shirts had moved beyond reflecting artistic taste and began to work as a class or identity signifier as logo culture culminated. By the early 90s, another shift was already underway. In places like Southern California and Tokyo, graphic tees were reimagined by streetwear pioneers such as Stüssy and A Bathing Ape, who merged countercultural graphics with branding in a way that made the T-shirt a tool for subcultural belonging beyond a marker of fandom or mass culture.
Vintage 90s BAPE Graphic Tee
MTV Logo 80s Vintage Graphic Tee
At the same time, luxury fashion houses were beginning to take notice. In the late 80s and early 90s, Armani, Calvin Klein, Vivienne Westwood, and Versace were among the first to put their names across the chest of a plain tee. They took what they’d once dismissed as too casual and rebranded the style as a status symbol, sold at prices far above its material worth. As Heddels notes, “the trend took off thanks to clever marketing and the exclusivity appeal. Wearing these garishly priced items showed off the fact that you could afford to spend that much money, even if you really couldn’t.”
Supreme Box Logo Tee
By the 2000s, the graphic tee had fully crossed into fashion’s core. Streetwear brands like Supreme, A Bathing Ape, and later Vetements built empires around the T-shirt. The appeal wasn’t in the garment itself, but in its scarcity and the cultural capital it conferred. However, the early 2000s also offered the baby tee—a smaller, slogan-plastered shirt tied to celebrity image-making. Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and Lindsay Lohan made these iconic slogans (“Stop Being Poor,” “Just Say No to Drugs,” “That’s Hot”) both trivial and instantly legible. Where Supreme was about engineered scarcity, these shirts thrived on visibility: paparazzi photos, tabloid spreads, and mass teen consumption through mall brands like Abercrombie, Hollister, and Juicy Couture. In their own way, they were just as much about performance and signaling—of femininity, wealth, and coolness—as the more masculine streetwear tees of the same decade.
Paris Hilton
Christina Aguilera
Naomi Campbell
High fashion soon folded both of these currents into its logic. Jean Paul Gautier, Louis Vuitton, and Balenciaga began incorporating graphic tees into runway collections, a move that merged the exclusivity of streetwear with the markup of luxury. As GQ noted in its piece on the “Age of the $100 T-Shirt,” the tee had become a paradox: casual, mass-produced, disposable, yet rebranded as a marker of irony, coolness, and wealth.
Louis Vuitton White Malletier Paris 1854 Graphic T-Shirt
Jean Paul Gaultier Vintage Portrait Graphic Tee
Today, the graphic tee functions as a more curative tool for personality. Whether politically, ironically, or aesthetically, it’s a way of signifying you ‘get it.’ Gen Z has pushed the garment into a post-ironic register: niche reference shirts circulate alongside thousand-dollar runway drops. At the same time, celebrities and influencers fuel microtrends that can flare and fade in weeks.
Cinnamon Girl Tees 'Priscilla' Graphic Tee
Library Science Graphic Tee on Kaia Gerber
The pace of these creations gives way to an unfortunate material reality: graphic tees are among the most environmentally damaging garments produced. While a quality material, cotton is problematically water-intensive because of the rapidity and scale of the shirt production. Screen printing relies on chemical-heavy processes, and both fast fashion and luxury houses churn out enormous volumes of them. The result is a garment that is at once enduring in symbolism and disposable in practice. Intentionality is essential to fashion choices in most any sense, but particularly when it comes to picking out items like these.
Comme des Garcons Spring/Summer 1995 Graphic Tee
Bjork Lyric Graphic Tee
The graphic tee has long been a canvas for protest, pride, pop culture, and persona. It adapts because what we want to say and be seen saying is never static. But even with all that symbolic weight, the price point of today’s luxury graphic tees can feel surreal. Two thousand dollars for cotton with a screen print raises the question of what we are truly buying. Maybe not the shirt itself, but the meaning layered onto it—even as part of its actual cost is environmental waste and overproduction. The graphic tee still carries cultural and artistic significance, but in many cases, it also carries consequences we’d rather not read.