The Genuine Marcel Tank Top from Roanne in Switzerland with Encore!
Warm Marcel!
Simple.
Here’s the adjective that the fashion world associates with the tank top. A pair of jeans? With a simple tank top. A long tulle madness? With a simple tank top. This basic piece establishes itself in the wardrobe with a key function: to highlight. Like a blank page that would reveal, by contrast, what should be remembered in a silhouette. The winner of this shaping is the body, that great mold. Never have the biceps and bulging traps of rapper 50 Cent – to name just him – stood out as powerfully as framed by this absence of sleeves.
The reason the tank top is so popular is that it is part of a lineage of timeless garments, so valued today, in contrast to ephemeral and extravagant fashion. Strong pieces that withstand the test of time, that go with everything. Such well-designed pieces that they would need to be invented if the first mechanical knitting machines specialized in hosiery had not taken care of it at the end of the 19th century, in France and England. As its name suggests, the tank top was born from port economy, with the necessity to lighten the outfits of workers sweating while unloading (de-barking...) the cargo arriving by boat, in London or Marseille. It needed
a breathable garment, that absorbs sweat and above all a fitted outfit, that does not risk getting caught in the gears of a machine.
From market workers to Hollywood stars:
However, for nearly a century, circular knitting machines produced seamless stockings and socks. This technique was adapted to produce tank tops. The real ones are knitted in a stitch called Richelieu, with tight ribs on the sides, broad in the front, thus ensuring great elasticity in cotton clothing, well before the invention of elastane. In Paris, the strong arms of the market workers, those who moved boxes of goods from these fabulous central markets, eventually cut the sleeves off their pullovers. A bonnetier from Roanne, Marcel Eisenberg, quickly reproduced this idea and the new outfit was named "marcel," after him.
This undergarment reclassified as workwear became the emblem of the working class, laborious and needy. At a time when industrialization was dispossessing manual workers of the meaning of their labor, the tank top came to highlight male bodies, exposing them to looks in all their wild strength and their helplessness against machines. It is to this imagery that Hollywood clings: pumped up on testosterone, protruding muscles, and sweat, the tank top signifies the bad boy. The icon of this vision remains obviously Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, in 1951. He plays Stanley Kowalski, a brutal Polish worker, who self-describes as "common as dirt" that social frustration and sensual desire push beyond all prohibitions. A prestigious lineage of tough guys in tank tops and bare arms follows suit, from Yves Montand in The Wages of Fear (1953) to John McClane in Die Hard, passing through James Dean, Rambo, and Robert De Niro. An old American term still refers to the tank top as "wife beater," in reference to the cliché of the proletarian at the end of his rope, who takes out his frustrations on his wife.
A more hygienist, but no less muscular, vision coexists with the brutalist symbolism: it is the sports undershirt. Wrestlers and other weightlifters already used sleeveless outfits to make their efforts visible to spectators. Other disciplines began to adopt it at the beginning of the 20th century, when medicine discovered the benefits of movement. Swimming especially contributed to popularizing this form of garment, as swimsuit tops were inspired by it. Even for women, as demonstrated by Australian Fanny Durack, the first Olympic medalist in Stockholm, in July 1912. Freedom of arms, bodies, and ideas.
It wasn't until the end of the Great War that the tank top settled into women's wardrobes. Aspiring to a more emancipated life, the "Flappers" abandoned corsets and wore short skirts, with waists erased and sometimes trousers. The tank top contributed to this liberation of bodies, but one needs some courage to embrace it, as René Perle, the muse of photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue, did, her breasts free and heavy under this fabric that hides nothing, soaked in laborious virility. Later, from the 1960s onwards, the tank top was present in all androgynous games, blurring the barriers: hyper-masculinity was reinterpreted in a fragile version, a little boyish on the small breasts of a Jane Birkin, for example. Or in flamboyant exhibitionism, a basic ingredient of gay aesthetics.
Since then, the tank top has continued to play on the transgression of registers: it is lingerie, but has been worn alone from the outset. It is virginal, but hides its game well. It is masculine and brutal, but brings a disarming charm to those who wear it. It is of working-class origin, but it comes alive at night, to the rhythm of all musics. Isabelle Crampes, passionate about fashion history, has just immersed herself in this shifting symbolism, as the general curator of the "Model Garments" exhibition (until December 6 at the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations, in Marseille). The tank top is presented there, alongside espadrilles, kilts, work jackets, and joggers. "I was fascinated to dive into the archives," she recounts. "Every tank top image found was like a pebble that Little Thumb of history would have left to make us understand who we are. This garment hasn't changed a thread in 150 years, and it has encapsulated us a thousand times, a thousand times freed. In its pure white, the human reveals itself."
The tank top traverses time and fashion with its chin held high, with all the elegance of its historical baggage. In the current quest for authenticity, several brands offer a traditional manufacturing: the French Eminence, the Swiss Zimmerli, but also small trendy companies, betting on local production, such as the Etablissement Marcel, in Roanne, which aims to revive the legend of the region.
