The other night, a friend and his partner, a well-known fashion designer, visited for dinner outside. The designer wore sneakers, trousers, a T-shirt. As an admirer of T-shirts, I wanted to see what his was like – what shirt does a famous designer choose when nobody cares? – but it was cold, and he quickly wrapped himself up in a blanket.
Which makes sense. If the primary job of clothing is to preserve a body’s heat, a cotton T-shirt is useless. Dry, it insulates or cools about the same as a napkin. Wet, it becomes clingfilm, grasping in summer, dangerous in winter. But clothing has many functions, and many of its jobs, most of its jobs, have nothing to do with temperature. Clothes are not fashion necessarily, not costumes necessarily, but costumes are clothes, and fashion is too. It’s strange. I think of fashion as clothing that’s been activated, switched on, the materials imagined as more than, say, heat preservers. Fashion suggests an idea of where society is, where shifts are taking place, not to mention something about the person who wears it. For those tasks, at this moment in time, the T-shirt excels.
So, what is a T-shirt? A textile contrived into a shape with four holes. Evolved from undergarments, it has become, oddly enough, probably the most popular thing worn among seven billion human beings on their upper halves. Handy, simple, keepsakes, remembrances of concerts heard, landmarks visited. Wynton Marseilis once said in an interview that the only advice he gave young people was to cultivate becoming cosmopolitan, meaning to be comfortable in your own skin, able to sit at dinner next to anyone and talk as equals. A cotton T-shirt says cosmopolitan to me. No pretense, but also no disdain. Everyone owns a T-shirt. The T-shirt is for all.
What is this? A weekly newsletter by novelist Rosecrans Baldwin consisting of (very) short essays about things he finds beautiful. Any books mentioned should be on this Bookshop list. Rosecrans’s next book, Everything Now, is available for preorder.
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