Regular readers will know that I've recently been on holiday in Cornwall where, in a break from tradition, the weather was idyllic.
I even saw Queen drummer Roger Taylor's enormous, oligarch-shaming yacht parked on the Helford River. I couldn't pick out Brian May sunbathing naked on the deck with my binoculars, though believe me when I say I did try.
What regular readers won't know is that the only holiday clothes I bought to take with me were some plain T-shirts in a three-for-two deal at my local supermarket. They had a choice of black, grey and two shades of blue (navy and sky: or Falkirk and Manchester City if, like me, your understanding of colours is closely tied to football tops). Annoyingly, they'd completely sold out of white, which was the colour I'd gone there to buy.
Now while Gap may have done much to popularise the grey T-shirt and Prada has made shiny black ones almost acceptable under a suit jacket, the white T-shirt is still the classic.
After all, it was a white T-shirt that Marlon Brando wore in A Streecar Named Desire and a decade later our old friend Hardy Amies was able to write that, while T-shirts were much in favour among young people, they were still rarely seen in colours other than white. In other words it sailed through the 1950s and 1960s untroubled by rivals.
It's the colour that makes it so neat. It's dazzling, at least until the first wash. But most of all the white T-shirt appeals because of its minimalism and lack of design. It's a T-shirt and it's white – what else is there to say?
Well, if you're rapper Kanye West, there's this: "That'll be £80, please." West has teamed up with French designer label APC (a favourite of mine, as it happens) to design a small capsule collection consisting of nine pieces of clothing.
Fair enough, but what is there to design about a white T-shirt, which is one of the items in the range? Did he come up with a new version of the colour, a la Yves Klein blue? Hard to believe. Is his shirt modelled on a different letter of the alphabet – an M, perhaps (very long sleeves) or an I (no sleeves at all)? Or does he speak a foreign language I don't know about which has a 27th letter that's a better shape than T, M or I? Nope. This is just a plain white T-shirt, albeit in finest Egyptian cotton. In its July 29 edition, Time magazine reported that fact under the headline: "The end of irony."
Kanye has had the last laugh, however: just as it was in my local supermarket, his high-end garment has sold out. Whatever the price, it seems we can't get enough of the plain white tee.
barry.didcock@heraldandtimes.co.uk
Twitter: @barrydidcock
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