I have been fond of vests ever since those plain white cotton ones we wore for primary school athletics in the long ago and mythically hot summers of the mid-1970s. No other garment in the male warm weather wardrobe is quite the same. A T-shirt isn’t as breathable, while a loose linen shirt even half unbuttoned doesn’t allow the cooling air to play around the shoulders in the same way. And neither allow you to catch the sun on your skin so pleasingly. They only really come into play in high summer: you wouldn’t attempt one in May or September. But for July and August, when, in a good year, the temperature consistently gets into the thirties, if paired with cotton shorts and flip flops or sliders, they are about as stripped back as the male wardrobe gets away from a beach.
I won’t publicly name and shame the person in question, who is now an accomplished novelist and urbane radio presenter
I wouldn’t wear one to Glyndebourne, a court appearance or a job interview, but otherwise I have long found them pleasing informal summer attire – and stylish in their own way. Men generally look relatively good in them, I always thought. This is because the male body gains weight and loses definition around the midriff while the upper arms and shoulders tend to look comparatively buff, even on a dad bod. (A caveat here is that this looking relatively good only applies if the shoulders and, particularly, upper back are almost or completely hairless: any man at the more hirsute end of the spectrum should never, ever wear vests.)
The classic rendition of course is Marlon Brando, playing Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. Certainly his shoulders didn’t lack definition – while raging in his white vest, he smouldered as much as the New Orleans nights. Another example I fell for in my teens was on a now largely forgotten but then zeitgeisty book cover. The 1982 Picador edition of Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story showed a Matt Dillon lookalike in what my fashion-informed wife tells me is a ‘washed plum’ coloured vest. The fact that this was a gay memoir and that its imagery was gently homoerotic went over the head of my spellbound but straight teen self. I wanted the look. And I’ve worn vests ever since – usually in white, occasionally black, but never attempting anything as ambitious as washed plum. (A second caveat here: string vests are always wrong, no exceptions.)
However in recent years I’ve found that the popular response to this staple of my summer wardrobe has increasingly been one of scorn. During Covid, when meeting my mother on Zoom while clad in one, she pointedly asked as though I were still a schoolboy, rather than a man in later middle age: ‘John Sturgis, are you wearing an undervest?’ Meanwhile friends who encountered me wearing one began to witheringly describe my vest as ‘a wife beater’. This pejorative term, apparently imported from Australia, seems lately to have acquired ubiquity as a synonym for the male vest – which doesn’t help. However, rather than spurious domestic violence associations, I think that their main image problem is indirectly linked to that 1982 book cover which had captivated me.
Because vests were, at that exact point, becoming fashionable. The young Wham! days George Michael, for example, took one up at around the same time. And by the mid-to-late 1980s they were everywhere – but suddenly, rather than chic, this seemed naff. And soon they were worn by dreadfully uncool pop acts like Go West and, later, Right Said Fred; a case of ‘I’m Too Sexy For My Undershirt’. Vests don’t seem to have ever really recovered from this brush with mainstream fashion. But I stayed loyal regardless, wearing them every summer. Or rather I did until a turning point a few years ago when I witnessed the stir that a senior colleague provoked – by wearing one to work.
I won’t publicly name and shame the person in question, who is now an accomplished novelist and urbane radio presenter, but who was then a duty editor on a red top newspaper. One scorchio Sunday circa July 2017, he turned up to take news conference wearing shorts – and a vest. The fact that this outfit deviated significantly from accepted dress code wasn’t the issue. It was more the reaction of colleagues, particularly female colleagues, to how he looked in the vest that struck me: it was not received entirely favourably. And the negative reaction was compounded by the fact that he seemed to fall foul of my rule regarding vests combined with body hair on the upper arms or back. But I noted this reaction and have never worn a vest inside the North Circular since.
So instead, these days they have become more of a guilty pleasure. I’ve now taken to wearing mine only when I’m pretty sure I won’t bump into anyone I know – on dog walks or when on the allotment, say. Or if I’m feeling particularly relaxed and overheated perhaps in a market in the south of France. But I still like them and believe deep down that I look like Marlon Brando when I wear one – even if others apparently see more of a resemblance to Rab C. Nesbitt.
Comments