You might have seen a loop in the back of some of your shirts if you’ve ever paid attention to your clothes. Men’s dress shirts often have this loop on them. You might not have known this before, but if you see it, you can use it for something. People often dress casually when they wear a button-down shirt.
If you wear it with the right pants and other items, it can look dressy. The back has a small loop for people who spend a lot of time at the gym. It makes it easy to take off the shirt and hang it up, so you don’t have to look for a room or make sure there’s a place to put it before meeting other people somewhere other than home.
The loop has also been used to show whether a person is single or in a relationship. If the loop isn’t on the shirt, it means the person is stable and doesn’t need to hang their clothes anywhere else. The loop is just an extra piece of stuff on the back of clothes, so it doesn’t really mean anything anymore.
Style in the United States has changed a lot in the last 100 years, and sometimes it’s fun to go down memory lane to learn a bit about the past. Your findings will show that some things have not changed at all.
Not just for clothes for guys, this is true. The back-of-the-shirt loop is a small but important piece of information that you may have missed. It’s right there in the middle of the yoke, daring you to take it or use it to spin the shirt around on your finger.
A lot of oxford or button-down t-shirts have this stitched on. It’s usually called a “locker loop” or “fairy loop.” How does it work? As you might have guessed, the loops are meant to be used to hang the t-shirts up. Some people think that locker loops got their start with US soldiers who used them to hang up their T-shirts on ships.
They became common for guys to wear in the 1960s, especially on college campuses where they were seen as “preppy” clothes. Gant, a clothing company, is credited with making this button-down shirt popular on Ivy League campuses across the country.
