New York Times Takes Brave Stance Against Tank Tops

Boy it’s a scorcher out there. I wonder what people are wearing out on the streets of New York as the summer temperatures have routinely risen to heights climate experts are calling “hot as shit.”

According to the New York Times, the answer is: Not much. Intrepid reporter Guy Trebay is on the case, raising alarms about what he’s calling “a startling degree of license about what passes for street wear” and what I’m calling “a concerted effort to look sexy while avoiding visible back sweat.” Paired with a series of photos of people looking good and beating the heat, Trebay’s piece has a lot to say about why people are seemingly wearing less this summer than ever before.

Or are they? People take their shirts off in New York every year. In fact, I would argue that summer in the city doesn’t start until you’ve seen a shirtless man in your bodega buying an ice cold Poland Spring. Trebay himself knows this, as writer Brendan O’Connor pointed out on Twitter, because he wrote a different story about people taking their shirts off in the summer back in 2013. To the Times’s credit though, the photography is much better this time around.

The problem with the aforementioned great photography is that it undermines Trebay’s point. Trebay whines about New York letting propriety fly out the window in favor of being absolute slobs, asking if the city’s denizens have “abandoned vanity for comfort and conceded the city’s edge in the global competition for primacy among urban fashion capitals to places like Paris and Milan.” Unfortunately for him, almost everyone photographed for the piece is pulling off a serious fit. Skin is in, baby.

It is the business of the Times to explain the goings on of young people to their parents, and I’m sure this latest will be fodder for lots of emails from mothers to daughters that go something like, “Will you put a real shirt on now 🤣”

But the girls will not put on a real shirt. We will stand defiant, shoulders, backs, and titties out, bravely declaring “Oh my god, it’s so hot.”