The White T

Edited by Alice Harris, with an introduction by Georgio Armani and dedicated to "all of the men, women and children living with HIV and AIDS," THE WHITE T is a tribute to the cotton shirt, from its humble origins in the U. S. Navy as an undershirt, to its steady growth as a garment for the working-class male to its position in high fashion. The actor Don Johnson made a fashion statement in "Miami Vice" by combining the T with an Armani flowing suit. It is not unusual to see the T-shirt worn that way now at weddings, funerals and other dress-up events. There is enough verbage to tell you more than you ever needed to know about its history and photographs of people from every walk of life clad in a T. Ms. Harris incudes both the round-neck, short-sleeved T shirt and the other one known in the streets as a "wife-beater" in her collection. There are photographs of sailors (1945) and other military types and men at work, along with the rich and famous. The crew that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima is included just before their mission in 1945 as is the famous photo of Lee Harvey Oswald wearing a T-shirt just before he was killed by Jack Ruby (1963). We also get to see Elvis in his U. S. Army-issued T-shirt as he is getting innoculated at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas (1958). What we do not see, although he is incuded in another photograph, is Marlon Brando, in what must be one of the most famous T-shirt images ever shot, in the torn T-shirt scene from A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE. Nor do we see Clark Gable all teed out. We do see him, however, from the movie "It Happened One Night" (1939) where he removed his shirt to reveal a naked chest without a T-shirt. According to the accompanying text, Gable's bare chest "created economic havoc in the world of underwear, sending sales plummeting." There is a raft of actors and other famous people includng U. S. presidents here: Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Richard Gere, John Travolta, Diana Ross, Bruce Springsteen, the very young Truman Capote, Picasso, Jimmy Carter, John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan et al. Visual artists are represented as well: Paul Cadmus, David Hockney, Tom of Finland. Photographs by Herb Ritts, Sebastiao Salgado, Greg Gorman, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Duane Michaels and Arthur Tress show up here. My three favorites are "Bosnia" by Sebastiao Salgado, an incomparable shot of a small lad (p. 131); the photograph of Paul Cadmus and Jared French in 1938, photographed by George Platt Lynes--offering proof once again that no one lights a scene better than he-- and "Three Graces," the shot of three Giants baseball teammates photographed in 1958 by Robert Riger. An American classic well presented.