Why are wife beaters so long

What about the countless perfectly non-violent men and women of all socioeconomic backgrounds who wear the tanks? Should they be painted as impoverished, filthy, violent slobs?

Of course not! This is in no small part due to the increased exposure of domestic-abuse issues in the media. Over women every day are victims of sexual and domestic violence in the US.

Feedback See Today's Synonym. Word of the Day. Meanings Meanings. How did a violent term become a piece of clothing? Those subcultures came together in a pop culture vortex over the course of the '90s, with fashion and popular entertainment birthing a new clothing staple.

As for fashion, popular rappers like Snoop Dogg commonly wore undershirts, as did fashionable women with their oh-so-'90s flared jeans — picture Kate Moss in her Calvins. In the same era, movies like Goodfellas and TV shows like Cops — in which men wearing white undershirts made regular appearances when being arrested for beating their wives — were becoming pop culture staples, as was hip-hop music as America's prevailing musical genre. Why we still say it: Since , the term has been cemented in our sartorial vernacular.

For years, it has been seen, heard and read by most of us — mostly without controversy. Just take several recent comments by fashion insiders. In a conversation with Who What Wear in , Nasty Gal founder Sophia Amoruso said she "wore a wife-beater , Dickies and skate shoes, all with a studded belt" to her first job interview. In January, a stylist told Vogue , "I would always put the girls in some variation of a customized wife-beater and pair of customized jeans. But persistent though it is in colloquial speech, there is a counter-conversation happening.

Retailers already see them as unacceptable. Walmart, for example, calls them " white ribbed tank tops " and Target simply calls them tanks , perhaps having seen what happened in when a store did use the term "wife-beater. While our generation has sparked a debate over changing terms like " real women " or " plus size ," the conversation about wife-beater seems to have barely peaked — until maybe now.

With so many people now cognizant of domestic abuse, questioning how normalized its become in our society hello, NFL and ready to take action , this may be the time to start the debate. How has such a hot-button garment managed to survive through generations, without any visible change? Pop culture cameos and fashion subcultures, from Marlon Brando to queer disco, have transformed the wifebeater into an intersectional symbol — and satire — of masculinity.

In , when Detroit man James Hartford Jr. Pop culture gradually normalized wearing the wifebeater by itself, by leaning into the sexuality of such a body-hugging piece. With each decade, the wifebeater touched every point of the masculine spectrum — rockstar costumes, Hollywood action heroes, Compton rappers, and every bodybuilder in between.

As simple as the A-shirt is, such a revealing garment actually disrupts the heteronormative boundaries of menswear, where men are still gawked at for wearing anything remotely feminine.