The recipe for the perfect t-shirt

The close-up shots, the edgy script, the gripping plot and the delicious food cooked in the second season of The Bear couldn't distract us from the stylistic perfection of its characters' looks, not even this time around. In the case of Carmy, all it took to make a white t-shirt go viral was its great fit and actor Jeremy Allen White's iron biceps. A character who's obsessed with gaining a sense of control over his life, the white t-shirts worn by Carmy are the garment that most personifies his paralysing perfectionism, despite his real passion for archival denim he so lovingly keeps in the oven at home. With the same trick that brought James Dean to unprecedented levels of fame in the 1950s, the Merz b. Schwanen t-shirts worn by White are not only a combination of simplicity and practicality perfect for cooks and the like, they also happen to be cheap. Meaning that while fashion is busy drooling over ultra-expensive t-shirts, the solution is within reach of the wallet.

Like the dishes that will - hopefully - win Carmy's restaurant a Michelin star, the recipe for the perfect t-shirt is anything but simple. It requires a certain balance of silhouette, cotton weight, sleeve and bust length. And let us not forget the crewneck, the thickness of which must ensure that it does not shift as the wind blows. Apart from the German brand Merz b. Schwanen which, thanks to The Bear, in the past year has discovered a whole new group of fans - «When Christmas came around, the number of women reaching out and buying these for their husbands was something I’ve never experienced before,» explained a shop manager to the San Francisco Gate - another T-shirt brand with a profound cinematic heritage turns out to be Sunspel, a line of luxury basics that has dressed Christian Bale in The Dark Knight Rises, Daniel Craig in Casino Royale, and most recently Cillian Murphy at the last Oppenheimer premiere in London. Once again, it was the actors and their physiques that made the t-shirt a hit, but the quality of the garment that cemented its glory.

One of the main elements that lend star quality to the t-shirts of these two brands seems to be the quality of their cotton. That which makes up 100% of the t-shirts of Merz b. Schwanen is an organic product that comes from Greece, while that of Sunspel's best-selling line comes from the Sea Islands, a group of US islands with which the British brand has been working for more than a century. Beyond the origin of these cottons, beyond the right thickness of the fabric and the care with which these t-shirts are made, however, the real key to the success of Sunspel and Merz b. Schwanen is the silhouette which, ironically, does not rely on recognisability. Like the best pasta al pomodoro, like Carmy's cannoli, the garments of these two brands stick to the stylistic traditions that have made the white T-shirt a historical staple of the male wardrobe. Referring back to the style worn by American soldiers in World War II, to that of the aforementioned James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, a t-shirt worthy of a world premiere combines the practicality of the garment with the nostalgic elegance of a fitted sleeve. Iron triceps or not, the old Hollywood aesthetic takes the cake.