Not since the glory days of Eva Herzigova and the Wonderbra have we seen a display quite like this. At every turn, bare chests are being thrust into our consciousness.
They are there on stage at every music festival and caught on camera by the paparazzi most nights outside fancy restaurants. They are tanned and oiled, puffed and paraded.
The difference this time is that the cleavage in question is male. The images that have filled Britain’s slow news days of August have, for once, not been of female celebrities in their beachwear, but of their menfolk — of their menfolk’s pectorals, to be precise.
For the long lens specialist of 2010, the money shot is of a scantily clad male. Simon Cowell and Jude Law have, between them, commanded almost as much media coverage as Kelly Brook, which, considering Brook has declared this her “naked month”, is no mean feat.
I have tried, really I have, to look on the bright side and welcome this development as a step toward gender equality. But (a) is it not a little depressing that, of everything women have contributed to civilisation, it is displaying your naked chest that men have picked up on, and (b), well, just, eew! I can’t take it any more.
Those photographs of Cowell in his white drawstring trousers and mirrored sunglasses, an overgrown Ken doll dressed unconvincingly for kung fu, were bad enough, but then Cowell has long famously struggled with the concept of where one’s waistband should sit, so it is only to be expected that he would misjudge how much chest to display.
No, the final straw came when Law — the 11th best-dressed man in Britain, according to GQ magazine — took girlfriend Sienna Miller out for dinner in Mayfair, London, dressed in a V-neck sweater slashed as low as a wrestler’s vest. Gentlemen, please. Put it away.
Not long ago sightings of the male cleavage were pretty much limited to the dancefloor at weddings, when late-night revellers would inexplicably feel the urge to undo several buttons on their best shirt. Anyone present was too drunk to notice, so no harm was done. But a new breed of men’s T-shirts is scooped or slashed low enough at the front to make a full-frontal display of chest hair and musculature non-negotiable. In one generation, it seems, sober men have gone from wearing the top button of their pyjamas done up to letting it all hang out.
It began innocently enough. A few years ago, in an attempt to find some middle ground between suited-and-booted and jeans-and-T-shirted, fashionable men began a trend for wearing a T-shirt under a suit jacket or blazer. It worked almost too well — a victim of its own success, it quickly went from being an early adopter identifier to being a common sight on a Saturday night at provincial bars.
And so it was that those who had kicked the look off — Law, Will Young and Russell Brand, among others — began to push the envelope a little more, to put a bit of space between themselves and the Burton-clad masses.
They did this by replacing simple tops with faded tour T-shirts and then, when that too became a cliché, with the scoop-neck versions that began to be widely available in American Apparel, and later in Gap. At the most recent menswear shows, the look was given the seal of approval by that venerable house of French chic, Hermes.
The older generation of wearers has retained the jacket (so that Law now sometimes wears a jacket with a higher neckline than a T-shirt, which looks really odd), but a younger breed of male peacocks on both sides of the Atlantic — from JLS and the Kings of Leon to Gossip Girl’s Ed Westwick — has dispensed with its services, all the better to flaunt their hours in the gym.
Can we hope that this trend will slip away? Personally, I’m more than a little nervous. The more extreme the fashion trend, the more extreme the counter trend tends to be, and if there’s one menswear trend I’m seriously allergic to it’s a man in a poloneck. What happened to the good old polo shirt, anyway? Hello, boys? —