A shirt is a cloth garment for the upper body. Originally an undergarment worn exclusively by men, it has become in American English a catch-all term for almost any upper-body garment other than outerwear such as sweaters or coats, or undergarments such as bras. The term "top" is sometimes used in ladieswear.

In British English, a shirt is more specifically a garment with a collar, sleeves with cuffs, and a full vertical opening with buttons. This is known in American English as a "button shirt" or dress shirt. The world's oldest preserved garment, discovered by Flinders Petrie, is a "highly sophisticated" linen shirt from a First Dynasty Egyptian tomb at Tarkan, ca.

3000B.C. : "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." The shirt was an item of men's underwear until the twentieth century. Although the woman's chemise was a closely related garment to the man's, it is the man's garment that became the modern shirt.

In the middle ages it was a plain, undyed garment worn next to the skin and under regular garments. In medieval artworks, the shirt is only visible (uncovered) on humble characters, such as shepherds, prisoners, and penitents. In the seventeenth century men's shirts were allowed to show, with much the same erotic import as visible underwear today.

In the eighteenth century, instead of underpants, men "relied on the long tails of shirts ...to serve the function of drawers. Eighteenth century costume historian Joseph Strutt believed that men who did not wear shirts to bed were indecent.

Even as late as 1879, a visible shirt with nothing over it was considered improper.

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