The world's oldest preserved garment, discovered by Flinders Petrie, is a "highly sophisticated" linen shirt from a First Dynasty Egyptian tomb at Tarkan, dated to c. 3000 BC: "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.

[4] In the seventeenth century, men's shirts were allowed to show, with much the same erotic import as visible underwear today.

[6] Eighteenth-century costume historian Joseph Strutt believed that men who did not wear shirts to bed were indecent.

[8][9] Coloured shirts began to appear in the early nineteenth century, as can be seen in the paintings of George Caleb Bingham.

The first documented appearance of the expression "To give the shirt off one's back", happened in 1771 as an idiom that indicates extreme desperation or generosity and is still in common usage.

Some natural fibres are linen, the first used historically, hemp, cotton, the most used, ramie, wool, silk and more recently bamboo or soya.

Different colored shirts signified the major opposing sides that featured prominently in the 2008 Thai political crisis, with red having been worn by the supporters of the populist People's Power Party (PPP), and yellow being worn by the supporters of the royalist and anti-Thaksin Shinawatra movement the People's Alliance for Democracy (PAD).

In Spain in the 19th century, then in Argentina during the time of Juan Perón, the word descamisados ("shirtless") means the masses of the poor.