Popular Clothing Items That Should Be Familiar to Everyone

Tagged with blue jeans, boxer shorts, clothing, flip-flops on January 20, 2024

Most of us take popular clothing items for granted. Some of the items that are popular today didn’t even exist a hundred years ago. Clothing tends to be more casual than it was as recently as the late 1950s and early 1960s. Although there are still people wearing attire that’s more formal, most of them are business professionals.

The Most Popular Clothing Item in the World

The most popular clothing item in the world is the T-shirt. According to several of my sources, more than two billion of them are sold every year. Your definition of a T-shirt might not be the same as mine. I know people who call every kind of shirt a T-shirt, as long as it has sleeves.

Most Americans can recognize a T-shirt when they see one, whether it has short sleeves or long sleeves, a crew neck or a v-neck, with or without a breast pocket. If it has a collar like a regular shirt, it isn’t a T-shirt. T-shirts evolved from undershirts in the 20th century, and they’re never going to disappear. Undershirts have evolved as well, no longer limited to white. Some people use undershirts on the outside as well as designer T-shirts.

Blue Jeans

While today’s jeans can be any color, the most popular color is blue. Blue jeans started to become popular in the 1950s, influenced by movies with popular actors.

Sources say that the average American owns at least seven pairs of jeans. I have several, but I won’t bother to count them. In the past, because of the heat and humidity, I sometimes wore nothing more than basketball shorts and T-shirts around my house in the Philippines. I would only wear blue jeans when I needed to go somewhere.

I wear blue jeans and designer T-shirts around home these days, and I’m always ready to go somewhere without needing to change. The only time I need to change is when I have to wear dress clothing, which is rare, like when I attended a wedding recently.

Flip-flops

Flip-flops are a light type of sandal. They’re called that because of the sound they make when walking in them. In the Philippines, they’re called “tsinelas” (the “ts” sounds like “ch”) in the Tagalog language, “slippers” in the English language. Filipinos only wear shoes when going to work, school, or on special occasions. They wear flip-flops, or nothing, the rest of the time.

Some flip-flops are the most inexpensive types of footwear you can buy. As recently as 2020, I saw them being sold for less than $5 USD. When I was in the military, white flip-flops were used as “shower shoes” and cost less than a dollar a pair.

When I lived in Hawaii, while going through high school, flip-flops were the most common footwear. Most of them were “designer” flip-flops, costing a few dollars more than the least expensive ones.

These days, I wear “slides” because I don’t like the thongs between my toes when wearing flip-flops. I wear Crocs more often than not when I’m out and about.

Designer Boxer Shorts

It all started when sagging came into fashion in the 1990s. I won’t get into the details, but a lot of people took it to extremes. I don’t see it as much as I used to when I’m in the United States.

It’s not normally a fashion statement in the Philippines. A lot of the poorer people will wear trousers that sag simply because they don’t have trousers that fit them properly. Heck, they have shorts that don’t fit them properly as well.

I haven’t worn boxer shorts since the 1980s, when I was in the military. Briefs, and boxer briefs, are much more comfortable, and I always wear one or the other. Undergarments are designed to protect outer clothing from perspiration, mainly. I will never understand why some men refuse to wear any at all.

Image by VersionFrancaise from Pixabay