Muscle-Fit Shirts: Fashion Crime Or Flattering Wardrobe Staple?
The one, terrible thing about looking good naked must be how rarely you get to show people. Blame public decency laws, blame the Victorians, whose terror of nudity led them to cover the genitals of classic statues with tin fig leaves, but there are very few places where you can shed your kit without someone complaining.
Well, there’s Instagram, of course. And the gym. And the beach. And Instagram photos of you in the gym or on the beach. Then there’s public parks, lads nights out, doctor’s surgeries (a limited audience there, admittedly). But these are all places for casual dress. For the man with refined tastes and abs like a cattle grid, the opportunities to dress up while ensuring everyone knows that you can also do a muscle-up are as far between as your bench-honed nipples.
Which perhaps explains the popularity of the muscle-fit shirt. If you’ve never delved into their aisle before (in which case, bro, do you even lift?) then know that they’re a smarter, collared spin on the oh-so-tight tee of the same name. Essentially, it’s clothing as form-fitting as a wetsuit, designed purely to accentuate the finely tuned bodies beneath – skinnier than slim, slimmer than skinny. Both have innocent roots, a sensible solution to a frustrating problem. But they also reveal what happens when something sensible is taken to its illogical conclusion.
Where Did Muscle Fit Come From?
First, the issue: off-the-rack shirts, which are made to fit everyone, actually fit no one. The further you move from the mean, the bigger the disparity. That mostly used to mean the overweight and over-height, who once had to make do with big and tall stores. But it also poses a problem for anyone who takes a really serious interest in picking heavy things up and then putting them down.
Lay a normal shirt flat and you’ll see the shape a child draws clothes – rectangular body, arms pointing out from the top. This is, loosely, the average shape of the average man. But this is not the shape of the sportsman, with his inverted pyramid, from honed shoulders to narrow waist.
