Mixte Magazine

Since it opened the Bottega Veneta Fall-Winter 2022-2023 show and closed the Prada show with actress and LGBTQ+ activist Hunter Schafer, the white tank top (or marcel in French) is reigning supreme in the ready-to-wear collections. If some brands lend it prestige and refinement through silk inserts – Sacai – or chiffon – Acne Studios –, others such as Chloé or Bottega Veneta prefer to associate it with butch lesbian dress codes (leather trousers, straight jeans, pointy boots and a confident walk) as highlighted by I-D magazine, which headlines: « AW22’s fashion must-have is giving butch », and Dazed, which identifies « lesbian tank tops » as one of next season’s trends. Apart from this « return to grace » of queer fashion, which is somewhat questionable in terms of the cultural appropriation issues it raises, the comeback of the white tank top on the catwalk is above all a new attempt to infuse a semblance of simplicity, or even subversiveness, into luxury collections. Over the past decades indeed, this sleeveless top, initially emblematic of the working class, has become a symbol of protest and emancipation for several minorities, notably for women and/or LGBTQIA+ people. So, at the dawn of the world after (yes, we still believe in it…), could the marcel be the perfect sartorial embodiment of liberation and the convergence of feminist, anti-racist, anti-classist and pro-LGBTQIA+ struggles?

Classy or not… Here I come

While it may be seen today on the backs of ultra-privileged  » daughters of  » like Kaia Gerber, the tank top has its origins in the working class wardrobe, far from the elitist circles of fashion. In France, the débardeur appeared in the mid-19th century and owes its name to the stockmen of the Parisian market halls, who were responsible for unloading goods (in French this action is called débardage hence the term débardeur). This woollen undergarment had a double function: to free the movement of the arms and to cover the body to protect the lower back from draughts. From dockers to soldiers during the First World War, not to mention factory workers, this piece was reserved for physical professions, making work easier and providing a little comfort. « A few decades later, at the end of the 19th century, the industrialist Marcel Eisenberg, owner of the Marcel hosiery factory in Roanne, adopted this model, and gradually the tank top took on the name marcel », says Denis Bruna, head curator of the fashion and textile department at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and author of Histoire des modes et du vêtement, du Moyen Age au xxie siècle. Around the same time in the U.S., it is the uniform of this same working class, especially Italian immigrants like Robert de Niro in Raging Bull. It is also the outfit of Marlon Brando who plays a Polish worker in A Streetcar Named Desire. What do these characters have in common? They beat and sexually assault their wives.

Just like the infamous American James Hartford Jr. who was arrested in 1947 for beating his wife to death. His mug shot of him posing in a tank top made the rounds in the US, earning the apparel the nickname « wife-beater ». « The wife-beater helped to forge the image of virilistic strength, » Denis Bruna says. From Bruce Willis, who holds the future of humanity in his hands in Die Hard, to Nicolas Cage in Wings of Hell, as well as the neo-Nazi played by Edward Norton in American History X, this figure of the violent alpha male in a white tank top still hangs over pop culture. In music, it also continues to provide a certain street cred a la Eminem, the broke rapper in 8 Mile, and more generally in hip hop where it evokes both the outfits of basketball players and those of prisoners. But rather than being confined to the evocation and celebration of toxic masculinity, the tank top was to embody a much more social and egalitarian dimension from the 1930s onwards, as it became the symbol of paid holidays, at a time when workers were leaving the factories and dropping their shirts on holiday. Considered an iconic reference for street fashion, it created a place for itself in pop culture and cinema. From Depardieu and Dewaere in Les Valseuses to Franck Dubosc alias Patrick in Camping, it became the symbol of a working class whose bodies, usually constrained by work, enjoyed for a time a semblance of freedom.

Struggle Bestie

But if it liberated the bodies of the working classes, the tank top also emancipated those of women, this time with a much more political and militant stance. « I’m thinking of Gabrielle Chanel, who stole her boyfriend’s tank top and put her underwear over it, » says Vincent Grégoire, creative director of the trend agency NellyRodi. The subversiveness of this garment rests on two aspects: the first one is its androgyny pushed to its paroxysm, with Jane Birkin in the 1970s in the video clip of « Je t’aime moi non plus »: a reference that will make the feminist and gender question about clothing evolve a little more. This change had already begun in the 1930s, when wearing a white tank top as a sign of feminist rebellion was then reserved for the bourgeois and artistic elite, especially women like Renée Perle, a model photographed by Jacques Henri Lartigue wearing a bra-less tank top. For Denis Bruna, « these women allowed the tank top to become the symbol of a liberated woman’s body, which of course opposes this symbol of machismo ». Just like the sportswomen of the time who enjoyed the privilege of wearing it in order to improve their movements in the water and therefore their performance. This is in fact how the term « tank top » came about, « tank » being the English slang term for basins. As you can see, it is precisely at this point, in tight-fitting wet-T-shirt-mode with visible nipples, that the marcel increased its subversive potential by giving off a different, much more erotic image in Western culture. « It can be a real sexualised statement. Indeed, not everyone is socially allowed to wear one.

“For example, in Asian culture you can show your legs, but you don’t show your shoulders, that’s hyper-erotic. You don’t show your neck in Japan either, because it’s a highly erogenous zone, says Vincent Grégoire. When you’re wearing a tank top, you are showing your tattoos, your breasts, your piercings, your body, your skin! It’s much more daring and provocative than a T-shirt. » This hardcore, kinky, and militant imagery particularly appealed to and suited the LGBTQIA+ scene, as Denis Bruna reminds us when he looks back at the history of the tank top in queer culture: « In the 1970s, in San Francisco, the tank top became a streetwear item , taken over by the homosexual community, where it was seen on the backs of the queer gay butch before being taken over by the lesbian scene later on. It was no longer the undergarment worn under the shirt, it became the piece of clothing that gay men used to distinguish themselves, also to show their very muscular bodies. At the time, the physical culture of body-building was fashionable in the gay community, and the tank top became a way of showing off the body.” For the historian, it was also a way of reconnecting with the roots of the tank top while subverting its codes: « On the Village People’s 1979 album covers, the working-class man is in a tank top. He wears his original outfit, which is also an emblematic garment for showing off his body.” Have we come full circle yet? Almost.

Blanc page syndrome

In the postmodern era, the tank top is becoming even more politicised and is in fact supporting specific battles. For instance, in the 1990s, Calvin Klein used it to promote genderless fashion and more generally to support the LGBTQIA+ community. When the brand launched the first mixed fragrance CK One, the tank top was at the centre of the campaign. Similarly, during the AIDS epidemic, « Calvin Klein’s tank top was used to display this white undergarment as a token of purity, as if to say: ‘I’m not sick, I’m healthy' », recalls Vincent Grégoire. And it is indeed to the tank top that we can attribute the first signs of the « free the nipple » movement from the early 1990s to the present day. Cindy Crawford, the buxom nineties beauty in the Pepsi ad, Jennifer Aniston as the girl next door in Friends and more recently Bella Hadid, all of them wear the tank top without underwear, playing on its transparency to better liberate their woman’ body. The tank top has clearly become, in spite of itself, a standard of militant empowerment. « It’s the anti-establishment, dissenting garment par excellence », says Vincent Grégoire, adding that from the end of the 1980s, it was Jean Paul Gaultier’s work that embodied all the battles in one, positioning itself as a kind of proletarian lingerie celebrating the gay aesthetic (#JPGForEver).

So in 2022, what’s the sitch? It all depends on who it’s for and in what context. According to stylist Camille Bidault-Waddington, the tank top has kept its rebellious soul: « Strangely enough, I’ve only started wearing tank tops since fully embracing my homosexuality. I used to think it was a bit common because of my old, heteronormative, middle-class upbringing. Now I love the androgyny of it and the fact that it blurs the lines of gender and sexuality.” According to this season’s collections, cultivating and celebrating this butch lesbian vibe is in order: « It’s a very easy piece to read, but also intriguing and exciting at the same time. With Its James Dean masculinity as well as its tomboyishness, with or without muscles…It’s the ultimate queer garment. » If it has entered the mainstream of fashion, Vincent Grégoire suggests that the tank top can still carry certain battles, « particularly in the context of body positivity, because it shows skin and makes certain bulges visible. At a time where we see the return of the pro-ana aesthetic on TikTok or the return to grace of the slimming style of the Y2K years, it can be a way of accepting and embracing one’s body.” In just 170 years of existence, the white tank top seems to have stood the test of time. This piece of fabric is at once the most basic, the most universal and the most political, to the point of being able to reinvent itself indefinitely and to change the codes attributed to it: « The tank top is wearable by everyone, in any way and with anything. It’s a bit of a blank page, » concludes Camille Bidault-Waddington. It’s up to us to write the rest.