Removing it from his chest: the myth and meaning of Paul Mescal's waistcoat

Paul Mescal, the actor who rose to fame after his role in the BBC's adaptation of Normal People, loves to wear waistcoats. He wears them to the shops, he wears them to perform in musicals and he wears them to dance in hotel rooms for Rolling Stones music videos. He even wore a vest over another vest over a sleek white shirt in the Financial Times. More recently, he wore one under a double-breasted teal jacket on the red carpet. He is, officially, in the front line for the singlet throne.

The one place Mescal doesn't wear them, however, is playing Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. Marlon Brando, who wore one to play Kowalski beating his wife on screen, as the inspiration for the now thankfully discarded term "wife beater"; director Rebecca Frecknall reportedly banned Mescal from wearing the same type of waistcoat for her role in the new London production, as she wanted to move away from the "performance baggage" involved in the piece.

The way Mescal wears the waistcoat when he's on the move arguably takes him away from those past associations with a very toxic sort of masculinity.If Mescal has made a career of nuanced portrayals of men, from Connell in Normal People to Kowalski to a single dad in the independent film Aftersun, his waistcoats can be seen as singing from the same sheet. The neckline is elegant - regularly the hair from the chest is very low and highlighted by a sl...