It was the cinema and the music industry which helped to transform the T-shirt from an item of underwear into a garment that would become an essential piece of clothing for the youth of the 20th Century.

Personalities such as Marlon Brando in "A Street Car Named Desire" and "The Wild One", and James Dean in "Rebel Without a Cause" gave the young a new rebellious style, defiant and aggressive that broke with sober orthodoxy and the formality of the suit, and collar and tie. This was during a period in which ideas were changing in the world of youth and also a new sound was emerging for the middle class - Rock and Roll.

Until the middle of the 20th Century, the T-shirt was exclusively an item of underwear or a garment that was worn alone only by the lower working class, by the great sea of unemployed between the wars, or by sportspeople. The Beatnik Generation, one of the first counter culture movements, which included such well known names as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder y Lawrence Ferlinghetti, among others, adopted the T-shirt as a symbol of bohemian freedom. This was a few years before it became a widespread fashion for the young in the late 1940s and early 1950s, immediately before the birth of Rock and Roll.

The Beat Generation, accurately described by the then young journalist of the Washington Post, Al Aronowitz, as a "community of lucid minds", and whose intention was to interpret what was happening in the era with a new sensitivity, were a group of determined young people, disenchanted with the American lifestyle that was seeking to have society believe in the American Dream. They sought to reassert freedom, through poetry, jazz, creativity, spontaneity, sense experiences, and a less ordered and vagabond lifestyle, alcohol and drugs and the experiencing of all aspects of life in the face of conservatism and conventional morality.