The History of Flannel Shirts

Flannel is a fabric, not a pattern

Flannel describes the cloth. Plaid or check describes the design on it. A shirt can be both, but it does not have to be. Plain grey flannel is still flannel; a checked shirt made from a smooth fabric does not acquire a fuzzy surface just because the squares look convincing.

In the cotton flannels familiar today, brushing lifts tiny fibres from the yarns to make a soft surface. That raised layer is called the nap. Think of the difference between a neatly laid thread and the fine fuzz standing above it. Cotton Incorporated describes the process as passing the cloth over revolving brushes.

The cloth can be brushed on one face or both, and the surface can be lightly fuzzy or much fuller. Beneath it, the weave may be plain or twill. In a plain weave the threads alternate over and under; in a twill they form a repeating diagonal. The brushing can make those underlying structures less obvious to the eye.

Older flannel was associated particularly with wool. Cotton later became another important version, rather than a different name for exactly the same material. Fibre content, weight and the amount of brushing all deserve a look when you buy a shirt. “Flannel” does not settle all three.

That is also why our Oxford-shirt chapter uses different language. Oxford names a weave construction. Flannel’s familiar appeal is bound up with its soft surface. A brushed Oxford and a cotton flannel can both feel soft without being interchangeable fabrics.

Wales, weaving and shopping from home

Long before the American outdoor-shirt image took hold, flannel was a serious Welsh business. The Newtown Textile Museum traces production from work done on farms to an increasingly concentrated industry of carding, fulling and weaving. Fulling worked the wool cloth to bring its fibres closer together.

Mechanisation did not arrive with an overnight eviction notice for every handloom. Newtown had a successful mechanical mill running in 1853, while handloom production continued into the early twentieth century. There were different ways of making and finishing cloth side by side.

The wider Welsh wool trade also supplied cloth for enslaved people overseas. That trade belongs in the history alongside the farmhouses and looms; the industry’s reach was not confined to a picturesque local market.

In Newtown, flannel also helped change how people shopped. Pryce Jones opened his own business in 1859 and became an early mail-order pioneer. Customers could choose goods at a distance, with the post and railway doing the connecting. A soft piece of cloth was becoming a product you could buy without standing at the shop counter.

The museum’s study of his surviving catalogues describes swatches developing into labelled samples and fabric booklets. His 1878–79 circular listed roughly 120 kinds of textile and 90 garment styles on just six printed sheets. Evidently, a small catalogue could still give you plenty of ways to spend money.

Florence Nightingale ordered Newtown flannel in 1862. Jones subsequently used her name for a flannel, and an 1881 catalogue advertised a Nightingale bed jacket. Celebrity association was doing useful retail work well before anyone could put an affiliate link beneath it.

The modern product page has photographs, fabric details and a size guide where a customer once had a swatch and a printed list. The tools are different. The problem is familiar: helping somebody understand a garment they cannot yet touch.

Red shirts at sea

For nineteenth-century sailors, a flannel shirt could be a layer next to the skin, under a woollen frock or pea jacket. It was doing the less glamorous work beneath the outfit, even when its colour was anything but shy.

The USS Constitution Museum’s research into Navy purchasing records turns that into actual shirts and actual people. In 1814, Boston tailor Isaac Cook supplied 400 flannel shirts for the ship at $2.25 each. Sally Binney and her friends made another 200 from British flannel, charging $2.80 apiece.

By the 1830s, the Navy’s flannel shirts came in two lengths: 35 inches and 37½ inches. The long shirt makes more sense when you picture an underlayer tucked into trousers than a modern overshirt worn open above a T-shirt.

The young sailor in this hand-coloured portrait, made around 1848, has dressed for the photograph in a red shirt, pale trousers and a broad hat. Look between his feet and there is another period detail: the base of the stand helping him remain still for the camera. The Getty’s record explains the posing equipment. Looking casually maritime took a little assistance.

Red did not remain welcome everywhere. The Constitution Museum describes increasing uniform restrictions in the US Navy, followed by the familiar blue frock in the years before the Civil War. A practical garment could still run into a dress code.

When your shirt came with health advice

Flannel’s reputation went beyond keeping the wearer comfortable. Nineteenth-century health writers sometimes treated the shirt as an essential part of looking after yourself.

In November 1875, Hall’s Journal of Health urged readers to put on a loose red woollen flannel shirt and keep wearing it until the first of May, even in New Orleans. Anyone sufficiently unwell was advised to have another one for sleeping in, with the shirts taking turns airing on a chair.

The article even had an opinion on the colour: it favoured red because it believed the cloth would resist becoming thick and leathery. Warmth, washing, illness and the proper use of a bedroom chair all arrived in one small column.

This was period health advice, not evidence that a red shirt prevents illness. But it helps explain why flannel appeared so often beneath clothes as well as on top of them. People were buying an idea about comfort and bodily protection, not simply a look. The shirt had acquired a job description considerably larger than “goes well with jeans”.

The working shirt, without the costume

The man below was photographed in America around 1855–60. His shirt is red, his braces are pale and his hands rest together in front of him. There are no theatrical tools or impressive piles of timber.

The Cleveland Museum of Art calls it Workman in Red Flannel Shirt and Suspenders. His exact occupation is unknown. The museum notes that portraits of people in working clothes, without the tools used to identify their trade, are relatively rare.

That makes this small photograph particularly useful. We can look at the shirt as something a person wore, rather than as shorthand for a whole profession. The short front opening, narrow collar and braces do not resemble a modern checked overshirt, yet the red flannel is already doing its everyday work.

A Welsh miner’s stripes

A different working shirt survives at Museum Wales. Made by the Royal Welsh Factory in Newtown around the 1920s–30s, it belonged to a miner at Abercynon colliery. Its label calls it “The Leek Shirt. Real Welsh All Wool”.

The cloth is cream with fine blue stripes. The shirt has a rounded neck, a short buttoned opening and mother-of-pearl buttons. It is 96 cm long, with deep side slits and a shoulder yoke. This is a substantial length of shirt, made to reach well below the waist. Welsh flannel in the workplace did not have to mean a heavy red check.

A Melbourne shirt that looks almost like a T-shirt

Closer to home, Museums Victoria holds Roy Fisher’s flannel shirt from the South Melbourne Coal Gasification Works. Fisher worked there as a stoker and later a foreman. His shirt came from the final issue of clothing before the works closed in 1957.

It is light brown wool flannel, short-sleeved and collarless, with two buttons at the neck and a longer back. The museum connects the style with garments colloquially called shearer’s shirts. If your idea of a flannel always includes long sleeves and a turn-down collar, this little Melbourne survivor is worth meeting.

Set those three shirts beside one another and the variety is obvious: a red American work shirt, a striped Welsh miner’s shirt and a plain Australian pullover. The cloth travelled between jobs without requiring everyone to wear the same uniform.

How cotton joined the story

Wool explains much of the early history. It does not explain every flannel shirt in a wardrobe today. Cotton became a major part of the category, with its own yarns, finishes and uses.

A particularly helpful source is an unlikely piece of bedside reading: the US Department of Agriculture’s Market Outlets for Cotton in Some of the Principal Cotton Fabrics, published in September 1952. Its flannel chapter describes several cotton fabrics gathered beneath the same name. Work-shirt flannel was one of them.

The report explains how a large cylinder carries smaller rollers covered with wire teeth. As the cloth passes across them, the teeth raise fibres, commonly from the crosswise yarns, to make the nap. The amount of fuzz can vary from a faint trace to a much denser surface.

This is why softness is partly a finishing story. The cloth has to be made in a way that allows the desired surface to be raised. The machine is not simply polishing an already finished shirt.

The names in the report are wonderfully specific. Outing flannel could be plain- or twill-woven and was brushed on both sides. Canton flannel had a twill weave with a heavy nap on the back. Flannelette was a lighter, softly napped plain weave, usually printed. Similar names covered noticeably different cloths.

And shirts were only one destination. The same report lists cotton flannels in work gloves, shoe tongues, linings for gun cases, dust cloths and surgical dressings, as well as clothing and bedding. A soft surface was useful in places that never appeared in an outdoor catalogue.

None of this requires wool flannel to disappear. The wool and cotton versions could coexist, serving different garments and customers. When you see a modern cotton flannel shirt, you are looking at an established branch of the family, rather than a wool shirt that has somehow failed to be wool.

A flannel shirt with extra duties

This US shirt, dated 1940–45 by Paris Musées, puts wool flannel in a very different setting. Its olive-brown cloth, two flap pockets and shoulder straps make the military role easy to recognise.

There is more to it than the familiar pocket arrangement. The museum records a front panel intended to improve protection against gas, possibly added later. It also notes two small loops above the left pocket for attaching a decoration or ribbon. A shirt that initially looks straightforward has several duties built into it.

The label is marked 15½ / 33, a reminder that neck and sleeve measurements were part of the practical business of issuing clothes. Fabric names were only one line of the specification.

It is also worth keeping this wool shirt separate from the cotton sateen utility clothing in our OG-107 history. Similar colours and a military setting do not make two fabrics the same. An olive shirt may be flannel; olive fatigue trousers may be sateen. Look at the cloth as well as the outfit.

Checks, everyday clothes and grunge

So where does the big red-and-black check fit? It has a history of its own. Woolrich dates its Wool Buffalo Check Shirt to 1850, made in wool flannel. It became one of the strong visual associations around the fabric. That is a particular shirt and pattern within the story, rather than a definition of every flannel ever made.

By the time we reach the late twentieth century, the checked shirt also belongs to a very ordinary wardrobe. Jonas Dovydenas’s 1973 photograph of Ann Schindler at home in Grygla, Minnesota, is a lovely example of that relaxed way of dressing: checked shirt, jeans, bare feet, front door.

There is no dramatic event in the picture and no reason there needs to be. It shows how a checked shirt can work as everyday clothing, without the wearer having to perform an outdoor occupation. The archive records the person and place; it does not identify the shirt’s fibre composition.

Grunge later gave the flannel shirt another very visible life. Visit Seattle’s history of the local scene places its emergence in the mid-1980s and recalls flannel as part of the early-1990s look. The familiar combination of shirt and jeans could now carry musical and cultural associations as well as practical ones.

The striking thing is how little a shirt needs to change for its meaning to shift. Button it up for work, throw it over another layer, leave it open on stage, wear it around the house. The people and setting do a good deal of the styling.

Choosing a flannel shirt now

The history is entertaining, but a good purchase still comes down to the actual shirt. You do not need the heaviest possible cloth or a particular check to qualify. Choose the weight and fit for the way you expect to wear it.

A lighter plain flannel is an easy partner for selvedge jeans, especially if you already have plenty of texture in the denim. Under a canvas chore coat, it adds a softer surface without needing to become the loudest part of the outfit. With olive fatigue pants, grey keeps things simple.

The long history leaves room for all of these versions: red wool under a sailor’s jacket, a striped shirt at a colliery, a collarless pullover in Melbourne, or a plain cotton shirt on an ordinary morning. Flannel has never needed everyone to dress the same way. That is probably one of its better qualities.