Wear It Anywhere: The Capital Tee

Consider James Dean. White T-shirt.

Or Marlon Brando, as Stanley Kowalski, screaming Stella! Stella! -- the white-T-shirt wearer for all time. The T-shirt became outerwear, and nothing, really, ever looked better than plain white. Like California vatos leaning against a chain-link fence in bleachy white tees, tucked into starched chinos. Orale.

And on basketball courts, and on Eminem, the shirts got bigger, and then bigger still.

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In Baltimore, the big white T-shirt is worn past the knees like a nightshirt -- or a dress, some have sneered. The style in Washington is a tad more reserved, with the T-shirt drooping about two inches above the kneecap, which is just huge enough to tick people off.

"You can't even buy a burger for $3," says Sam Kataria, store manager at Expressions in Largo. "But you can buy a plain white tee and look fresh ."At Casual Male Big & Tall in Capital Centre, Viola Epps leans against a cubbyhole display of white George Foreman undershirts, ranging in size from gargantuan to XXXXXXL. She's had customers, slender boys with prominent shoulder blades, bringing tees fit for Dad (or King Kong) to the register, when Father's Day is not around the corner. That is when Epps, an assistant manager, usually tries to discourage them from buying.

"I don't agree with their trend -- it's too tacky," she says. "I don't think it's appropriate to buy four times the size you would normally wear. It doesn't look appealing at all." Epps admits, however, to buying oversize shirts for her nephew and 16-year-old son, since they won't wear anything else.

The boy who would swaddle himself in a T-shirt several times as big as he is may never admit to a raging case of insecurity -- his skinny biceps, the chest that doesn't puff out, a one-pack on the stomach -- but he will cling to other reasons.

It is nice to feel an ethereal breeze on a hot day. And he needs size triple-XL because the shirt will shrink and become "tight," which is somewhat girly. "It's like, dude, aren't you in elementary?" says Roger Cartlidge, 23, a Silver Spring Foot Locker employee and white-tee enthusiast.

It might also be considered a manly expression of love: When the Anger Management Tour stopped at Nissan Pavilion last summer, Eminem came out in his white T-shirt, and the white-teed, mostly white youngsters jumped up and down in the grassy cheap seats.

Not so with Leon Maiden, 14. Spotted on Seventh Street NW one evening in a modest double-XL, loosely tucked into black football pants, he claims: "It's just my style, what I wear. Sometimes if I don't have more shirts, I just wear a white tee 'cause I have a lot of them. They match with everything." Blue jeans, red shorts, green sneakers, combat boots.

Leon says he has "probably 10" at home, all Luxe-T. "These are the good ones. You know how you wash a shirt and the collar stretch really high? These don't." A clothes hanger won't stretch them out either, Leon adds, which means he won't have to toss the tee, scissor off the sleeves, or thrash it in football practice, like the one he is sweating into right now.