Exporter Ladies Plain Shirts
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 and through the eighteenth-century long neck frills, or jabots, were fashionable. Coloured shirts began 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 1860, when the Garibaldi Shirt, a red shirt as worn by the freedom fighters under Giuseppe Garibaldi, was popularized by Empress Eug’enie of France. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Century Dictionary described an ordinary shirt as “of cotton, with linen bosom, wristbands and cuffs prepared for stiffening with starch, the collar and wristbands being usually separate and adjustable”.