The simple white vest is an iconic style, and a favourite of men from Tony Soprano to Stanley Kowalski, Marlo Brando's character in A Street Named Desire – but its nickname has become somewhat dated.
Now, Gen Z social media users have come up with a new term for the jarringly named “wife beater”, after a resurgence in popularity of the white tank top.
People have started referring to the item as a “wife pleaser” to make it less triggering for victims of family and domestic violence.
Tutorials on how to style the top have surged in popularity in recent times, while fashion magazines and websites have started listing them in articles like the “best wife pleasers of the summer”.
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The term has been prompting anger for several years already. In 2018, The New York Times ran an opinion piece titled: "Are we really still calling this shirt a wife beater?"
“I myself have used the term before — and I’ve worn the shirt plenty — but this time it stopped me cold. Given the torrent of revelations of abuse against women in the #MeToo era, the name suddenly seemed grossly inappropriate,” wrote the author.
He continued: "We don’t call our pants 'child molesters' or our hats 'cat mutilators'. We immediately recognise such descriptions as violent and abhorrent. And yet, we somehow overlook the same when we call our shirts wife beaters."
The “wife pleaser”, by contrast, appears to have been in use since last year, and has now gone viral again.
In July 2022, InStyle ran an article about American actor Chris Evans’ love of the item, called ‘Chris Evans’s "wife pleasers" are this summer's ultimate fashion throwback".
Social media users on TikTok are also calling it the “wife respecter” and a “wife caresser”.
And in 2018, Jonathan Van Ness, star of Netflix series Queer Eye, even called it a “wife lover”, when the cast were helping a subject choose an outfit on the show.
The term wife beater, meanwhile, has far more sinister roots. It appears to have entered common use in 1947, when a man wearing a white tank top was arrested for murdering his wife.
His mugshot was nicknamed “The Wife Beater”, and the term stuck.
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