This Was The Summer of the Ripped-Up, Threadbare T-Shirt

It wasn’t the baby-faced content creators with gift bags brimming with runway looks of whom I was most jealous, but a middle-aged journalist wearing an old rag of a t-shirt. It was navy, or at least used to be, with sleeves hanging from a series of moth-eaten holes at the shoulders, and it had presumably once belonged to a graduate of Columbia, though the exact year of their matriculating class had been lost to a splodge of paint obscuring the final digit. It was the kind of thing that even a charity shop would send to landfill, but here, at a beachside dinner in a five-star resort, it seemed more desirable than everything around it: namely, brand-trip nepo-babies in never-before-worn clothes, taking in the burning sunset of the Mediterranean through their front-facing iPhone cameras. He said he found the shirt on Vinted.

I’m not alone in wanting clothes to look as though they’re a bicep (…if I had one) curl away from disintegrating. “This is literally what I live in,” former Dazed editor-in-chief and Acne Studios CMO Isabella Burley said on a recent episode of the podcast An Excellent Fit, referring to a Minnesota Athletics tee she bought from Scout, a vintage store on Los Angeles’s Melrose Avenue, with a gaping side seam and sagging neckline. “When you first get them, they’re the perfect amount of ripped, and then you start living in them, and you’re like, ‘OK, a boob is gonna fall out,’” she said. “There’s a shred of this left.”

Though she sells her own covetable line of T-shirts from her Climax Books stores in London and New York, it is arguably those at the end of their life that fashionable people are using to distinguish themselves. Which makes sense: at a time when there is just so much fashion, when so many trends feel flat and disposable, garments with a visibly lived-through past stand out. Anyone can buy a pristine t-shirt from The Row (… or Uniqlo), but not everyone can wear one with the particular cobweb of holes that Connor Storrie was again photographed wearing earlier this week.

It reminds me of something Martine Rose often says about an acid-smiley Boy London T-shirt given to her by an older cousin in the ’90s. “It’s been washed thousands and thousands of times, and it’s imbued with so much emotion and wear that I find it’s become this fragile, delicate, amazing thing, something that you can never buy off the peg. That is the definition of luxury,” she told Gilded Birds in 2021. Speaking to British Vogue three years later, she added that “it represents my nine-year-old self awakening to the otherness of subcultures”.

Vogue’s fashion and style editor Mahoro Seward has similar things to say about a now “sun-bleached, moth-eaten, disintegrated” Eckhaus Latta tee they bought on eBay at 20 years old. “I was obsessed with the brand’s high-brow yet off-kilter runway pieces, but couldn’t afford any of the few pieces that made it into production back then,” they tell me. “I found this tee for a reasonable price and hit Buy It Now without a second thought. It felt like a membership badge to some secret fashion club that I was desperate to gain access to, and I wore it everywhere. It’s a souvenir of the early spark of a great life passion.”

Fashion, of course, has long been fascinated by the way clothes change through wear—and what it means to wear something new that looks old. Vivienne Westwood stained and slashed T-shirts at the height of punk in the ’70s; Rei Kawakubo described the holes in her 1982 knits as “Comme des Garçons lace”, later telling Vogue that “too much importance has been placed on slick, polished images”. By the ’90s, as the threadbare aesthetic of grunge took hold, Martin Margiela was popularising “la mode destroy”—aka deconstructionism—and Hussein Chalayan buried his graduate collection in a friend’s garden and left it to decay for months, while Robert Cary-Williams sold bullet-ridden T-shirts inspired by William S Burroughs, who was known to shoot holes through books.

Not all such experiments have been well received. John Galliano’s controversial spring/summer 2000 “Hobo” collection, for example, drew inspiration from the worn-out clothes of unhoused people he encountered on the streets of Paris, and was criticised for aestheticising the kind of deprivation that others cannot simply buy their way out of. And yet distressed clothing has since become an accepted part of the modern wardrobe: ripped jeans, faux-battered trainers, fake band tees.

Pre-manufactured distress isn’t really what I’m talking about, though. Like anyone spending between $500 and $1,000 on a thrashed T-shirt from the second-hand store Saint Luis in New York—or, indeed, Scout, or far less on Vinted—when I wear a Jean Paul Gaultier marinière, with what look like cat-scratches across the collarbones, I feel a slight sense of stolen valour. I didn’t earn those marks through life or labour or simply through the love of wearing the thing to near death. I selected it from a rack at the most recent Vogue Vintage Sale. In other words, I can’t claim the gritty authenticity that Seward or Rose can. Which, I suppose, is precisely what those of us searching for these T-shirts are really buying into.

“I’m inclined to think that their resurgence may be a product of the broader filtering of rave and rock sounds and aesthetics into the cultural—and, consequently, fashion—mainstream,” Seward says, noting that battered basics have been a fixture on the queer club scene for some time, while f***ed-up band tees have long been a thing in rock and metal circles. “The appetite for aestheticised dishevelment—a sense of hedonistic abandon—seems pretty high right now, and there’s something about a tattered tee that speaks to that quite succinctly.”

But there is a simpler reason for wearing a tattered T-shirt: it reveals the flesh beneath. Indeed, it is arguably much sexier to catch an unexpected glimpse of someone’s ribcage, armpit, or the softness of a nipple than, say, to have them thrust at you through a strategically cut-out vest. Towards the end of a plein-air party over the weekend, confronted by several examples of the latter, I found myself thinking of the birds that would soon be chirping overhead, their mating calls loosely translating as: “Would anyone here have sex with me?????” The possibility of exposure is a more potent way to hint at impropriety. I imagine that’s at least part of the reason Storrie—who could hardly be described as coy—looked so at ease in that T-shirt, its threads clinging to his brickhouse back.

“Up until recently,” he told Emma Chamberlain at the 2026 Met Gala, “I had the same five outfits for three years, and I would just interchange them and wear them into the ground.” Similarly, I still wear a Celtic football T-shirt my dad bought in the ’90s, now so shrunken and paper-thin you can see my skeleton beneath. I’ve started using it as a vest because I’m not quite convinced it has the same effect on the general public as Storrie’s does. But perhaps that’s beside the point.