Grumpy Old Man Before You Judgeme Please Shirt
In other instances, Hollywood sentimentalises or theatricalises the white shirt. Worn by Marlene Dietrich in a more feminine version, in combination with a men’s suit and tie. On Katherine Hepburn in the 1938 film Holiday, it evokes the ingénue and her independent spirit. Visually the white shirt responds well to the lighting used in Hollywood movies. In the 1930s it also serves to promote the emancipatory image of the modern independent and working American woman. Next to the sophisticated outfits created for the cinema, the plain white shirt affects an allure of democratisation of fashion.When it appears in 1961 on Marilyn Monroe in a scene from John Huston’s Misfits – a film set in the Midwest in an almost exclusively male environment – the white shirt’s androgynous appeal is transformed into a highly sexualised attractiveness: a curvaceous Monroe wears a simple white shirt with jeans, an outfit that contrasts abruptly with the overtly feminine printed dress she wears in other parts of the movie. Marlene Dietrich, Edward Steichen, 1931Marguerite Duras in 1950 exhibits, an altogether different way of posing male–female relations. Seduction here is subdued, replaced by the confidence of the Parisian writer smoking a cigarette and facing the photographer with none of the coyness of a Hollywood star.
Grumpy Old Man Before You Judgeme Please Shirt
Boys and Girls and Bankers … and a French IntellectualAfter the colourful and glitzy years of psychedelic, hippy and disco fashions, the white shirt returns in the mid 1970s. Patti Smith’s Horses album cover is almost exactly contemporary to David Bowie’s Thin White Duke, a character clad in a white shirt and impeccable three-piece suit that appears in the album Station to Station (1976). Both perform androgynous versions of the shirt. This moment marks the start of the white shirt as the unisex element in the realm of fashion. French ready-to-wear designer Agnes b opens her first store in 1975, and offers, along with jersey cardigans and stripped shirts, plain white shirts, all conceived as the emblems of a new minimal day wear for men and women alike.Bowie’s version of androgyny evokes Weimar era cabaret life, while Patti Smith claims a literary heritage that is found again at the same epoch in the public persona of young ‘new philosopher’ Bernard Henry Levy. Levy, who, after he publishes La Barbarie à Visage humain in 1977, soon becomes a public figure. His unbuttoned white shirt becomes a uniform that marks a distance from the traditional academic in suit and tie. His sartorial choice – which has remained consistent to this day – identifies a literary heritage (Balzac, encore) while its open buttons and rolled sleeves mark his involvement in public life and independence from bureaucratic institutions and also subtly nods towards the intimacy of the shirt as under garment.
