South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Reinventing the humble tank top
The first look at Matthieu Blazy’s much-anticipated debut for Bottega Veneta was none other than a plain ribbed cotton tank top. At Prada, a slimfitting undershirt-style white tank, this one featuring a small triangular logo at the scooped neckline, opened the brand’s fall
2022 show (it’s available on the Prada website for
$995). On Chloé’s catwalk, a knit ribbed tank made from “lower impact merino cashmere” was paired with leather pants.
As summer temperatures peak, there’s no denying that this year, the season belongs to this staple. Once a humble undergarment, meant to be hidden from sight, it has stepped defiantly into the spotlight. Men and women alike are embracing its allure.
Stylist Bryant Christopher Simmons, 32, believes that part of the ribbed tank’s appeal lies in its versatility — the ways it can be styled and the price points at which it is sold. He owns a small haul, ranging from costly versions offered by contemporary labels to cheap versions from Hanes that he cuts so the hem hits right at his waist.
This spring and summer it seeped into the zeitgeist. When Esquire’s summer issue landed, it did so with actor Elliot Page on the cover, styled in a Polo Ralph Lauren ribbed tank and jeans. In March, actor and outre fashion plate Julia Fox cut a white ribbed tank top smack dab down the middle and wore it as a matching crop top and miniskirt. And when, this spring, Justin Bieber donned a hulking Balenciaga suit on the Grammys red carpet, what, pray tell, did he wear underneath? Nothing other than a white, ribbed tank top.
For nonbinary musician
King Princess, the ribbed tank top is a wardrobe essential. “People call me the tank top fairy,” she said, laughing. (She has a habit of handing them out to friends and collaborators.)
“I feel so powerful when I wear a tank top,” she said, “because of my own journey with my gender. Like, a tank top with a sports bra underneath makes me feel strong and powerful. It’s me at my truest nonbinary form.”
For such a simple piece of clothing — startlingly elementary in its design, merely a fabric tube with three holes — the ribbed tank has accrued myriad cultural associations. Worn in a straightforward, unironic fashion, it can read as either masculine or feminine — easily evoking the hackneyed image of the swaggering brute or a vixen eagerly courting the male gaze. Yet it can also be worn in a way that slyly undermines traditional gender roles, as demonstrated by its popularity among LGBTQ people.
“It’s such a great vernacular piece of clothing,” said
Valerie Steele, director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. “It has an allure because of this whole macho, Marlon Brando kind of feeling, and then, also, a very strong butch lesbian feeling to it. So it’s vernacular clothing with a strong sexual charge, and that’s somewhat transgressive.”
It also helps that, because it was first intended as an undergarment, to wear it on its own instantly imparts an aura of eroticism.
Tank suits to tank tops
Tank tops were first popularized in modern Western fashion during the early 20th century as a part of bathing suits for both genders, which, at the time, covered the torso with a sleeveless, low-cut top (the name is thought to derive from “tank suits,” as swimming pools were commonly referred to as tanks in England). Later they evolved into a standalone garment; according to Jamie Wallis, director of global communications at Hanes, sleeveless shirts
were introduced in 1928 alongside the company’s woven shirts for practical means: to help preserve the longevity of formal, collared shirts.
The tank top made the jump from intimate apparel to an object of desire through the lens of cinema, most famously cemented into the minds of the general public as a symbol of blue-collar virility by Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski in “A Streetcar Named Desire” in 1951. Hollywood has since used it as a sartorial shorthand for a certain type of machismo, from Robert De Niro in “Raging Bull” and Bruce Willis in “Die Hard” to James Gandolfini in “The Sopranos” and Vin Diesel in the “Fast and Furious” franchise. Still, it wasn’t until the sexually liberated 1970s that the tank top transitioned from undergarment to public-facing piece of clothing, so much so that Hanes, during that decade, rechristened it as the athletic shirt, or “A-shirt.” It has since been embraced by various subcultures, including skateboarders, 1980s punk musicians and rappers, injecting it with a sense of rebelliousness. Its pragmatic appeal for professional sports players has maintained its spirit of athleticism. It’s even had its fair share of controversy, as when, at the turn of the century, it accrued the distasteful nickname “wife beater” — a sobriquet that has, thankfully, fallen out of favor.
‘Reinvent, reinvent’
“For me, the ribbed tank has always been associated with elegance and sensuality,” designer Willy Chavarria said. In addition to overseeing his own namesake menswear label, Chavarria is a senior vice president for design at Calvin Klein, and often uses the ribbed tank in his work as a way to explore archetypes of gender and sexuality.
Chavarria, who is Mexican American, also riffs on its strong ties to Chicano culture. “There’s a strong level of sensuality in Latino culture and sexuality in queer culture,” he said. “I