Vintage Frut Of The Loom T-shirt. The origin of the Fruit of the Loom company dates back to 1851 in Rhode Island, when textile mill owner Robert Knight and his brother Benjamin established the "B.B. and R. Knight Corporation" after they acquired the Pontiac Mill in Warwick, Rhode Island. In 1856, the company changed its name to "Fruit of the Loom", while producing its first muslins.
A friend of Robert Knight named Rufus Skeel owned a small shop in Providence that sold cloth from Knight's mill. Skeel's daughter painted images of apples and applied them to the bolts of cloth. The ones with the apple emblems proved most popular. Knight thought the labels would be the perfect symbol for his trade name, Fruit of the Loom – an expression referring to clothes, paralleling the phrase "fruit of the womb" meaning "children that come from the woman's uterus", which can be traced back to the Bible.
