That I was wearing a tank top when my flight to Charles de Gaulle was grounded just an hour out of Newark did not bode well for what I had planned as a pageant of ease and grace, a rotation of high-end tanks enrolled as the stars of my wardrobe through Paris Men’s Week.
My travel tank, though, was of the mortal realm: a $25 black Gap racerback that I loved enough to buy in multiples. A go-to tank can make ambitious outfits look more grounded, and decision-making a breeze. But you already know these virtues as a likely wearer yourself; who among us hasn’t succumbed to the simple top’s outsize promise lately?
It is among the few fashion items that can truly claim timelessness, an exclusive club that counts T-shirts, jeans, trenches, and not many others in its ranks. But even evergreen pieces ebb and flow at the center of our collective obsession. For several seasons, fashion’s most powerful brands—Bottega Veneta, Prada, and Jil Sander among them—have cast tanks in a not-minor role on their runways. You could argue that the tank plot is climaxing at this very moment.
And though it is a popular pastime both inside and out of the industry to balk at the high prices of luxury goods, there comes a point where it makes sense to shell out for something that shows up so often in one’s wardrobe rotation. Some of these runway tanks cost literally 500 times as much as a Fruit of the Loom boy’s tank (a folk favorite, to be fair), but become sound investments with competitively low costs-per-wear if we’re getting all Economics 101 over here. Or so I imagined!
Over the next few days during Paris’s increasingly influential Men’s Week calendar, I would put various runway tank tops to the test and measure how they stacked up against the $20, $30, even $50 tanks lining my drawers at home. That is, if I ever made it out of this regional airport…
Day One
Courtesy of Laura Reilly
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