On black jeans, white tank tops, borrowed shirts and the women who made getting dressed look like no effort at all.

My theory about the white tank top is that it was never really about the tank. A garment that cheap and that plain has nothing to say for itself, so it hands the whole conversation to whoever is wearing it, and in the early 1990s the women wearing it were Claudia Schiffer, Cindy Crawford and a handful of others whose faces could sell anything, including underwear sold by the multipack.

Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele understood this before most people. For Anna Wintour's first Vogue cover, in November 1988, she put Michaela Bercu in a jewelled Christian Lacroix couture top and a pair of Guess jeans, and in one photograph the ordinary garment and the extraordinary one traded places. Cerf de Dudzeele knew exactly how much glamour a plain piece… Continue reading →