Jeremy Allen White is done being busy. For now, at least. After shooting his second campaign for Calvin Klein and scoring his second Emmy, The Bear star is taking a few days out just to chill. And while he was running some errands in Los Angeles, he executed a grand plan to revive a trend once thought lost to the menswear ether.
The same way White likes his vintage sneakers, he also likes his vintage tees. While unloading the trunk of his SUV, everyone’s fave executive chef rocked a beater T-shirt that was frayed around the edges with a few holes for good measure. The dye had washed-out into a light gray, and some of the stitching had come loose around the collar and the hem. It’s an aesthetic that British GQ‘s Murray Clark coined “slacker hot.”
“Think of slacker hot as like the pre-amble texts to a Hinge date,” says Clark. “The more communication, the more curation, the more effort, the quicker your mysterious enigma dries up. So you keep elements simple. After all, there’s an innate confidence to committing solely to roughed-up staples.”
BG025/Bauer-Griffin
But when you squint your eyes and really look at his top, you’ll notice something a little… different? The graphic on the front looks like it has completely disappeared with age, but in reality, White actually just flipped the piece so that the inside was showing on the outside. The T-shirt itself was merch from a 1988 Crosby, Stills & Nash concert. And by turning it inside-out, the actor is doing something from 1994.
That year, Los Angeles Times journalist Kathleen Williams wrote a column about a trend that she called “reversed attire.” According to the piece, the aesthetic was created so that people could wear messages of protest or rude slogans without causing any sort of public outcry. Fashion designers eventually jumped on the fad, and while “defiant dressing” isn’t really a thing anymore, Jeremy Allen White maybe wants it back.
And you thought it was just a straight-up junk T-shirt.
This story originally appeared on British GQ.
