To communicate the story and the character traits in these silent movies, Hollywood had to develop a shorthand for different ideas. For example, people with black hats were bad and white hats were good. To denote a husband character who was mean and possibly beat his wife, they would put him in a ratty sleeveless undershirt, which would become the reason they started calling that type of shirt a wife beater tank top.
It happened in real life too. There is a famous case and ensuing newspaper picture from that may have helped give the wife beater its name.
That year, in Detroit, a man named James Hartford Jr. Another pop culture explanation of the wife beater shirt coincides with the decades where these shirts went beyond a simple undershirt and became an actual fashion. In the 80s and 90s, you start to see the wife beater tank tops become more a part of mainstream fashion. At that time, one of the first reality shows came on television, the show COPS. The show followed real cops as they chased bad guys of all sorts.
As more people started getting arrested on TV, the stereotype of wife beaters being arrested in the shirts they would help name proved to be more fact than exaggerated fiction.
So, it seems like the term wife beater being used to describe a sleeveless white tank top started sometime between or so and the s, right? Well, one more version of where the term comes from actually goes all the way back to medieval times and has nothing to do with domestic violence at all. On the medieval battlegrounds centuries ago, a soldier who had lost his armor and was left behind to be killed or beaten was known as a waif. These waifs who lost their armor would be left with nothing to protect them except a thin, chainmail undershirt.
And, the same sense made its first appearance in The New York Times in No connection yet between violence against women and t-shirts, though. However, in , a brutal crime story went viral and indirectly associated a violent male wife beater with the sleeveless white undershirt. A Detroit native named James Hartford Jr.
Around the same time, Hollywood reinforced this connection between lower class, brutish men and the undershirt. The shirt was a mark of immigrant status.
Kowalski from the movie was Polish, yet the white tank was often linked to poor Italian-American men too. Teens and somethings dismissed it as a funny term and used it mockingly. But, while they mocked the term, they wore the shirt. As the wifebeater built a hyper-masculine persona through pop culture, evolving past and overcompensating for its lowly origins, it was only a matter of time before the machismo bubble burst into camp.
The garment that once defined masculinity was suddenly defying it, as a tongue in cheek performance piece. And it was in the hands of queer culture, decades later, which embraced the shirt as a costume and performance rather than as identification with an abuser. Like its journey through pop culture, the wifebeater bounced between queer micro-aesthetics. All of these groups embraced the garment as nothing more than a performance of masculinity.
Had the queer community not absorbed the wifebeater as a cheeky caricature of manliness, it may have never evolved past its sleazy first impression.
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