'I feel swaddled, protected': review of Prada's £700 white waistcoat

Want to pay £700 for a vest? A vest ? Even on Prada's terms, the Italian fashion label for the ridiculously loaded is surely taking the sartorial piss here. except for a hundred times the price, was one of the most sought-after items of the year. It's the third 'trending' item on Lyst's fall list, which monitors what people buy, Google and tag on social media, and British Vogue called it the item that has defined 2022. It's sold out everywhere.

I've always loved a vest, but like Stanley Kowalski of Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, I don't tend to wear it in underwear. The undershirt is my shirt. Unlike Brando's Kowalski, I don't wear vests because I'm a hot, ripped, testosterone-filled Adonis. No, I wear vests because I don't like clothes.

Clothes oppress me. I just find them uncomfortable. Jeans chafe (big thighs), shirts are too tight, sweaters wave in the wrong places. Clothes make me too conscious of my body and make me feel uncomfortable. As soon as I get home, I go back to basics: pants and a sleeveless vest, sometimes enhanced with a dressing gown.

It's not an acceptable look for the workplace. So I always start with a shirt or sweater. But there's bound to be a time when I feel bullied by my top. It's too hot, tight or itchy. So the shirt/sweater comes off and the vest comes in.

It doesn't always go well The editor was appalled when she the view. Conversations took place about appropriate clothing. An editor banned his team from wearing vests as anything other than an undershirt.

Looks were one thing, associations were one other. Vests bring out class snobbery at the very least because of their association with working class men.

Then there is the horrible problem of connotation of "woman beater". Kowalski may have been the epitome of red-blooded beauty, but he was also a violent alcoholic who beat his wife and raped his sister-in-law. He was defined by his waistcoat. Some say this is when the humble Vest became known for a time as a wife beater; others say the phrase dates back to 1947 and James Hartford Jr's conviction in Detroit for beating his wife to death. He was photographed in newspapers wearing a stained vest. Another theory claims it dates back to medieval times when soldiers who lost their armor on the battlefields were known as "waifs". All they had to protect them was a thin chain mail undershirt, known as a "waif-beater". This explanation was later claimed by filmmaker Paul Davidson, who sought to show us "how dangerous it can be to take something at face value on the internet".

Sleeveless ribbed vests fell into disrepute. I can't get a decent one for love or money. My last one cost about five cents from Amazon Essentials. Mine are made of thin, in...