Panning for gold on your behalf this week – translation: browsing the web and eating chocolate cornflake mini-bites – I came across a YouTube video shot by fashion and style website Mode. It purports to show 100 years of male fashion in three minutes, though it's mostly an excuse for a buff young model to be stripped to his tight white Y-fronts every few seconds as he's dressed, undressed then re-dressed by an army of stylists.

It's meant as a mildly diverting piece of online flim-flam. But watching the styles move from Great Gatsby to skinny Gap jeans, and seeing the whole thing speeded up and condensed into 180 seconds, one thing becomes very clear: that in a century of men's clobber, only one item of clothing has been truly revolutionary.

If I tell you it arrives in the section devoted to the 1950s, a mental image of Marlon Brandon in The Wild One will pop into your head so you'll think it's either the leather biker jacket or rolled up denims. It isn't. It's the T-shirt.

Until its arrival on the fashion scene, the four staples of men's fashion were the shirt, the tie, the suit and the hat. But the T-shirt was a game changer, far more than leather jackets or blue jeans. The only reason fashion types tell you otherwise is because you can't charge £200 for a white cotton T-shirt.

As well as telling the shirt/tie combo it was no longer the only game in town, the t-shirt pretty much did for the hat and it was so radical that it would be 30 years before anyone would be brave enough to try to wear one with a suit. That honour goes to actors Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas, who rolled up the sleeves of their Armani jackets and donned T-shirts in 1980s cop show Miami Vice. Trailblazing BBC arts guru Alan Yentob continues the tradition today.

What's so wonderful about the T-shirt is the way it has adapted and changed over the years at the same time as keeping its shape – an irony, given how poorly the things stand up to washing. So while a T-shirt will always be just a T-shirt – like the wheel, you can't reinvent it – in different eras it has been used as an advertising billboard, a political platform, a blank canvas for self-expression (you haven't lived until you've tie-dyed a T-shirt) or even a sort of petri dish for advances in clothing technology. Remember those Hypercolour T-shirts from the late 1980s, the ones that changed colour when heated up thanks to the thermochromic pigment contained in the fabric?

So for once, our old friend Hardy Amies was well off beam in his ABC of Men's Fashion when he dismissed the "tee-shirt", as he calls it, as an "undergarment ... rarely seen in colours other than white" and only permissible when seen peeking over the top of an unbuttoned shirt.

If we see any more decent weather we'll be glad of our T-shirts. But if not, we should still wear them with pride and accord them the respect they deserve.