Vests are back

ON October 8, 1666, that little-known fashion historian Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary: 'The King hath yesterday, in Council, declared his resolution of setting a fashion for clothes. It will be a vest, I know not well how; but it is to teach the nobility thrift.'

Two and a half centuries later, the garment that King Charles II brought into vogue by royal decree was taken up by the menfolk of America when, in 1913, the US Navy began issuing sailors with vests to conceal their chest hair and to keep the sweat off their outerwear. The vest became a classless all-American staple - until the release of It Happened One Night in 1934.

During a now-infamous scene with Claudette Colbert, Clark Gable removed his dress shirt to reveal, not a white vest, but a bare chest. In the following months American men removed their undershirts en masse. Vest sales fell by 75 per cent, causing some American underwear manufacturers to try suing Columbia studios for loss of earnings.

Lately, the vest has staged a comeback, however. When Brad Pitt stepped off a Venice waterboat to join the Riviera ratpack, the vest visible beneath his shirt looked every bit as studied an accessory as his sunglasses, hat and facial hair.

Flick through recent issues of leading men's magazines and the modern vest appears in very different guises, often on very different guys. In an advertisement for hair products, there was an ultra-white, ribbed version on the torso of a young model. Distance runner Mo Farah wore a Team GB singlet, while there was a shot of a powerfully-built Australian criminal wearing a vest in classic redneck style, pectorals to the fore, in another. But most striking was a double-page spread of Senator Barack Obama meeting the world's Press during a flight to Virginia, a nerdy white vest (or 'undershirt', as they say in America) ghosting into view behind his neatly pressed business shirt.

The vest - or to give its offensive nickname, the 'wifebeater' - is a socially mobile garment with a multiple personality. Wear it with a medallion and you are Kid Rock, all knuckleheaded peacockery; wear it a la 1970s Bruce Springsteen and you're rootsy Americana. Stovepipe pants, a trilby, cuts and bruises and a tangle of neckwear and you are doing lowlife chic.

It is a difficult look to pull off. It is to a man's wardrobe what the miniskirt is to a woman's - unforgiving, unflattering and probably better on someone young.

A close-fitting ribbed job brooks no hiding place for the beer belly and can transform anything less than the most toned chest into a pair of man-breasts. But, at this level of male fashion, dignity and decorum are irrelevant.

If the vest is ever to regain its place in mainstream wardrobes it will have to address the dark side of its image. The sleeveless vest has become the globally franchised mufti of the layabout and the sloven, a kind of power-dressing for the adipose and proudly unemployable - ironic, given that it was once so closely associated with honest, healthy, manual graft.

The slacker associations of the vest, which began with Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, continued with Brad Pitt, circa Thelma and Louise, and reappeared with cameos in everything from The Sopranos to My Name Is Earl, have grown ever more aggressive.

Worn on its own, revealing great hams of authoritative upper arm and distended stomach, the vest now looks simply wrong without some sort of fast-food effluvium staining its bell-shaped front.

The name wifebeater supposedly originates from the US fly-on-the-wall TV show Cops, in which many of the men arrested for spousal abuse were caught on camera wearing the aforementioned stained, sweaty undershirts. If it were not depressing enough that the ugly loserdom of this show has entered sartorial vocabulary, there is now a Texas-based T-shirt company, wife-beaters.com, capitalising on the apparently hilarious notion of domestic abuse with a line of novelty items. Undershirts with 'wife-beater' printed on the front come with optional extra details: blood stains and cigarette holes.

While you shop online, The Prodigy's Smack My Bitch Up provides a soothing soundtrack. Click around a bit more and you'll discover a "Wife Beater Hall of Fame" that includes Ike Turner, James Brown and OJ Simpson, along with a series of pictures showing a man with his hand raised over a woman's backside.

And no, I am not making this up. Even allowing for the modern concept of negative marketing, where words with dark connotations can become oddly aspirational brand names - the skatewear label Pervert and Sean John's Unforgivable fragrance, for instance - the 'wifebeater' sobriquet is surely a tag the vest needs to leave behind.