009: The White T-Shirt
For most of my life, I never made much of the simple white t-shirt. I began wearing t-shirts with a singular devotion by the age of ten, when my mother realized no amount of fight could get me into a frilly frock. T-shirts, I found, were a window into my soul, and as such, there was nothing plain or simple about them. One t-shirt I owned exclaimed "DESTROYED" (which now, older and wiser, seems questionable) in an explosion of purple glitter set on white, another favorite, this one in black, read "french connection" but what I wanted it to read was "FCUK". As a teenager, deeply steeped in a love affair with Limewire, I wore punk-adjacent t-shirts with anarchist or anti-christ manifestos printed down the front and Blink-182 men's shirts altered to fit my teenaged frame. I placed these orders with my father, who would unquestioningly go to Hot Topic during trips to America for his residency to purchase them on my behalf, which is quite possibly the absolute antithesis of punk, or that in its un-punkness it is actually quite so? I never disregarded the plain white t-shirt, it's just that I was unsure of how to be myself in it.
A plain white t-shirt, however, I feared. It said so little and required so much of myself, and who I was, who I am, has long been a puzzle for me. A white shirt has so much more to say: an upturned collar or sleeves pushed past the elbows say something. Take for example, Peter Lindbergh's iconic photograph of six rising-star models in white shirts on a Santa Monica beach in 1988. All six models wear almost identical shirts, but it is in the way that the garment drapes, hangs, clings, caresses, a collar askew or turned up, that it conveys something about each of them. We, the spectator, can glean something from the way that it is carried: who is Estelle, who is Karen, who is Rachel, who is Linda, Tatjana, Christy. More than a decade later, we meet once more with Lindbergh and the white shirt, in The Power of the White Shirt for Vogue Italia. Five near-identical shirts on five distinctly different women. Again, something in the minutiae of its being worn, the possibility of broader range of play with a sleeve, a hem, a collar, a button, communicates intent, purpose, range.
I have recently been thinking a fair amount about the white t-shirt, principally due to Miuccia Prada's one-woman campaign for the simple white tee. On the cover of Perfect Magazine's most recent issue, she graces us with this ordinary garment, neither loose nor clingy, the sleeve just so. At the tail of Miu Miu's Spring 2023 presentation, Mrs. P appears for a split second, as she is wont to do, clad in a leather jacket and matching skirt, and a white t-shirt. Mrs. Prada is not, however, foreign to the white t-shirt, often wearing this humble garment under a navy v-neck sweater. She has even taken it to new lengths, sending it down the runway on a shimmery model in 2009, extending it to a dress wrinkled within every inch of it, an effect achieved using metal thread, yet it looks most seductive on Mrs. Prada herself, who wears it with patent leather mary-jane high-heels and three strings of pearls, smouldering in a photo taken by Mikael Janssen.
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The simple white cotton tee came into its final iteration in the 19th century, worn, as you may have guessed, by wealthy men as a protective barrier between their skin and their outer garment, and, I imagine, as an indicator of their good wealth. By the early 1900s, the United State Navy adopted the white t-shirt as its official underwear. There is something perverse about the white t-shirt as a utilitarian garment, of wearing it day in and day out for purpose, bearing any and all exertions. It is also important to note its implied domesticity, either learned or relied upon, who cleans it or how it is cleaned, as well as social class and gender. To wear something so ordinary as a white t-shirt and to make it mean more than its associations with red-blooded machismo (Stanley Kowalski) or reckless boyish masculinity (James Dean), or sex (where would the wet t-shirt contest be without it?) or conformity (French Girl Style) requires an unwavering conviction in oneself to exude.
What I find so alluring about Mrs. Prada's interpretation of the white-shirt is her tongue-in-cheek approach to it. It is neither macho nor sexy, she who is rather infamously opposed to conventional and ingrained ideas of sexiness but magnetized to strangeness. Paired with an intentionally weathered biker jacket and a demure mid-length skirt, also of leather, challenges and confuses the limited dynamics to which the white t-shirt has been tethered. Layered with priceless antique necklaces, it surpasses sex and humility and reaches instead for opulence. Stripped of all the bells and whistles and flourish, she must channel all of herself so as not to be rendered a mere vehicle for the white t-shirt. This is where conviction, a certainty of self is necessary. The white t-shirt is given new meaning and character, her own meaning. Here she presents an idea to us: bring your own meaning to it, not what it has been predisposed to.
A few months ago, an Internet Friend (are there any other kind?) told me about the time Mary-Kate Olsen appeared unannounced and uninvited to her friend's wedding party, inexhaustably dancing the night away in a pair of trousers and simple white t-shirt. Somehow, my friend remarked, in the midst of an extravagant wedding, everyone and the bride dressed in their very best, she was still the best dressed person in the room. That's the power of conviction.