Whether it’s Bruce Willis crawling through air vents in Die Hard, Wolverine in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, or most famously, Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, the sleeveless tank top is one of the most recognizable – and controversial – articles of clothing around.
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Seeing someone wear this shirt with one of the worst names, the “Wife Beater”, creates a particular image of a man who is either sleazy or violent. But why does this shirt have such a stereotype, and where does the name come from? It turns out that it can be traced back to a man from Detroit.
Detroit, 1947
The term “wife-beater” to describe a basic popular shirt is pretty jarring. As a kid, you don’t know the meaning behind the phrase, and as you get older, it is either desensitized or you realize how messed up that name really is.
The connection between violent men and the “wife beater” shirt goes all the way back to 1947, when a man named James Hartford Jr.graced the cover of the New York Timesin a tank top covered in blood splatters after he gruesomely beat his wife to death. He was branded as “the wife beater” in the media, and many believe the association between the two helped solidify the name.
“A Streetcar Named Desire”‘s Impact
Much like how the shocking crime of beating one’s wife captivated the 1940s public, seeing one of the cinema’s most popular actors do the same crime and much worse in the same A-style tank top around the same time as the real-life crime is believed to have further generalized this term.
In 1951, a film adaptation of the play A Streetcar Named Desire, featuring Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski, showed this fictional man commit violent atrocities against his wife and sister-in-law. In the story, Stanley assaults his wife, rapes his sister-in-law, is loud, drunk, and crude; a stark contrast to most men of the time…