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Evening Standard

Entertainment

Amy Francombe

The ‘wife pleaser’ — why white tank tops are having a renaissance

Prada TikTok

No one knows exactly when and why we started calling white tank tops ‘wife beaters’. Some theories date the name back as far as medieval times, when the thin, chainmail undershirt that soliders wore were called ‘waif beaters’. While others pin it to a 1947 headline that called a Detroit man, who had beaten his wife to death, wearing a stained undershirt a “wife beater”.

Since then the white vest hasn’t been able to escape unsavoury connotations with domestic violence. Especially after Marlon Brando’s portrayal of Stanley Kowalski in the movie A Streetcar Named Desire, where he played a drunken, abusive husband who wore a stained white vest.

In fact, the name has prevailed despite the ‘90s resurgence of the white tank top, when they became the unofficial off-duty uniform of models, when everyone from Kate Moss to Cindy Crawford rocked them not as an undershirt, but as a fashion piece in its own right.

It led The New York Times to run an article titled ‘Are We Really Still Calling This Shirt a ‘Wife Beater’?’ in 2018, which argued that: “We don’t call our pants “child molesters” or our hats “cat mutilators.” The author, Moises Velasquez-Manoff, was right: why are we so causally using such graphic language to describe something as innocuous as the white tank top?

Come the 2020s and Gen Z have taken it upon themselves to give the clothing item a much needed rebrand.

It all started in 2022 when influencers used the term ‘wife respecters’ to refer to white tank tops in GRWM videos. Unfortunately it didn’t stick — but when the term ‘wife pleasers’ started circulating on the internet, there was no turning back.

On TikTok, #wifepleaser already has over 11.4 million views, while #wifepleasertank has notched up 13.9 million. Here creators are fangirling over the new term, uploading “how to style your wife pleaser” videos and arguing with those who think it’s “cringey”.

“If you think ‘wife pleaser’ is corny or cheesy and you’d rather say ‘tank top,’ then fine, say ‘tank top,’” said influencer Xander Torres to the backlash. “I’m not the word police, I don’t care.”

The term has also penetrated pop culture, with a 2022 InStyle article proclaiming: “Chris Evans’s ‘wife pleasers’” as “this summer’s ultimate fashion throwback”. While Jonathan Van Ness even used the phrase in a recent episode of Queer Eye.

It’s not just Gen Z flying the flag for the white tank if recent sales figures of high fashion versions are anything to go by. While Prada topped Lyst’s rundown of best-selling brands of 2022 - largely thanks to their white logo adorned vests - Loewe’s anagram tank came out on top of the site’s hottest products list for the second quarter of 2023, proving the trend has serious staying power.

Now, with the undershirt’s current renaissance happening on TikTok - it’s officially a wife pleaser summer. Get involved with the chicest selects below.