Teens and 20-somethings dismissed it as a funny term and used it mockingly. One year later, the Washington Post wrote about the “‘in’ shirt with the outre name.” In a 2001 interview with The New York Times, Jesse Shiedlower, then principal editor of Oxford English Dictionary’s American office, said wife beater started signifying the undershirt around 1997 with the rise of “rap, gay, and gang subcultures.” In 1998-a year after the term’s introduction into the American lexicon- The Orlando Sentinel published an article about parents’ concern with the offensive slang term. Another boost came in 1992, when Dolce & Gabbana sent a militia of muscleshirt-wearing models down the runway. The practical reasons for wearing the shirt helped boost its popularity in the 1980s and ‘90s: tanks are inexpensive, comfortable, and easy to work (out) in. Ironic w ife beaters in the 1990s and 2000s Slang names for the undershirt at this time were “guinea tee” or “dago tee,” using ethnic slurs to define the shirt as something poor, dirty “others” wore. Kowalski (from the movie) was Polish, yet the white tank was often linked to poor Italian-American men too. The shirt was a mark of immigrant status. The term wife beater shirt still hadn’t taken hold, but the shirt went by other slang names that revealed additional stereotypes. In A Streetcar Named Desire, Stanley Kowalski (while wearing the undershirt) shoves Blanche Dubois to the ground. was arrested for beating his wife to death. Across the country, readers gaped at a reprinted photo of Hartford in a baked-beans-stained undershirt with the caption “the wife-beater.”Īround the same time, Hollywood reinforced this connection between lower class, brutish men and the undershirt. A Detroit native named James Hartford Jr. However, in 1947, a brutal crime story went viral and indirectly associated a violent male wife beater with the sleeveless white undershirt. No connection yet between violence against women and t-shirts, though. And, the same sense made its first appearance in The New York Times in 1880. This literal sense connecting wife beater and “husband who beats his wife” was first recorded in 1855 (according to the Online Etymology Dictionary). Violent w ife beaters in the 1800s and 1900s To contribute to this heated discussion, we think there’s no better time to take wife beater, the slang term for that ubiquitous sleeveless white shirt, to the dump for good.īut, how did the violent term become associated with a piece of clothing anyway? For that, we take an etymological and sartorial tour through time. We’re in a bubbling cauldron of gender issues, and they’re boiling to the surface. How did a violent term become a piece of clothing?
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