Of a Different Stripe
The power of antique stripe T-shirts to give an otherwise safe look personality and depth.Of a Different Stripe
The power of antique stripe T-shirts to give an otherwise safe look personality and depth.The humble T-shirt: a building block of wardrobes everywhere, and as foundational an element of the menswear canon as you’re liable to find. Which is all well and good, but when an outfit calls for a bit more intentionality, you need something with more character, more charm, more intrigue. Enter: the striped T-shirt.
From Breton to bar to bengal and every variation in between, the striped T-shirt has long served as one of Ralph Lauren’s favorite styling elements, no matter the season or the mood. The marinière, with its long sleeves and Gallic history, might be the most iconic and storied, stretching from French naval decks to Picasso’s paint-strewn studios to F. Scott Fitzgerald on the beaches of Antibes with his Tender Is the Night muses, Sara and Gerald Murphy.
The stripe-t was popular in the 1950s and only grew in influence after Mick Jagger showed up in a recording studio wearing one.
While nautical Bretons may be the most iconic, you’ll find T-shirts of a finer stripe, in both style and size, spread throughout Ralph’s design language. The “feeder stripe,” thinner and more condensed and often accented with a solid contrast collar, is both more subtle and more unique than your average marinière. Or an asymmetrical three-color stripe—Ralph and his team have nicknamed that one the “kid stripe,” after its historical prevalence as a cool style move at the drive-in in the 1950s.
And speaking of Fitzgerald and the Lost Generation history of the Breton, the striped T-shirt in this spring’s Polo collection had another literary legend—Ernest Hemingway, who sported stripes of all sizes and kinds in countless photos from his exploits in Key West. Ralph, ever inspired by larger-than-life characters and historical American style, pictured antique colors softened by hours spent out on the water, and splashed a palette of salt-washed and sun-faded hues in all manner of stripes across the season’s T-shirts.
As Hemingway shows, there’s something strong and swaggering about a striped T-shirt. They’re breezier, bolder, more self-possessed than their solid-colored cousins. They’re also infinitely useful. One of Ralph’s favorite styling moves is mixing a stripe underneath a solid for a hit of personality and visual depth. Look closely, and you’ll see it used in nearly every Polo collection across the decades.
On his travels in France during the 1920s, Hemingway picked up some Breton stripe shirts, and wore them for the rest of his life, especially on fishing expeditions in the Caribbean.
Try it yourself with a blue-and-white striped T-shirt peeking out beneath an open-collar chambray shirt and a blue blazer. A feeder stripe underneath a washed-out Western shirt, or a nautical stripe underneath a breezy linen one. Layer them under a tweed sport coat or a shawl sweater. Or, in the balmy months of summer, just throw on a striped T-shirt and shorts, toss a sweatshirt around your shoulders, and call it a day. It’s a formula that’s surprisingly difficult—dare we say impossible?—to get wrong.