THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. **** Saturday/Sunday, October 19 - 20, 2019 |D3
STYLE & FASHION
ON TREND/ JACOB GALLAGHER
That Constant Tugging of
Your Shirt? We Notice it
IN THE SECOND EPISODEof “I
Think You Should Leave with Tim
Robinson,” an absurdist Netflix
sketch show that premiered in
April, you’ll find a skit devoted
to T.C. Tuggers, the shirt “with
the little knob on the front.” Ut-
terly insane, the fictional shirts
boast a bottle-cap-sized pull-tab
at the midsection, which, accord-
ing to Mr. Robinson’s character,
is there “so you don’t wreck your
shirt or hurt your hand” when
pulling your T-shirt down over
your belly. Would anyone actually
wear a T.C. Tugger shirt? I hope
not. But this silly skit is rooted
in a familiar real-life tic: Many
men pull on their shirts, just be-
low the rib cage, just above the
belly button, constantly.
The sketch was inspired by Mr.
Robinson’s own tugging habit. A
former “Saturday Night Live”
cast member and writer, the co-
median explained that he and
some of his peers tug on their
shirts when they get “trapped on
your belly.” The bizarre bit of
comedy that resulted shines a
light on the pervasiveness of
clothing- and hygiene-related
fidgeting.
Kobe Bryant used to suck on
his basketball jersey during
games like a baby pulling on a
pacifier, to the horror of keen-
eyed Laker fans. Charles Dickens
allegedly combed his hair upward
of 100 times a day. Albert Ein-
stein apparently liked to wriggle
his toes unimpeded by socks—he
“hid the lack of civilization inhigh boots” according to a letter
he wrote to his second wife Elsa.
I’m not immune to this kind of
fidgeting: I play with my shirt
collars all day long, pushing them
back and forth as I search for
that elusive point of sartorial
equilibrium.
Sometimes we adjust our cloth-
ing quite unconsciously, the way
many people abstractedly nibble
on their nails or grind their teeth.“Yesterday I was walking to the
park and I noticed myself absent-
mindedly touching my shirt to
loosen it up around my midsec-
tion,” said Jamison Hermann, 31, a
video producer in Brooklyn, N.Y.,
and a not-so-proud shirt puller.
Like a bad tell in poker, the habit
can be mortifying.
“If I catch myself doing it, I’m
like, ‘What are you doing—you’ve
got to stop tugging on your
shirt,’” said Michael Berkowitz,
26, a product manager at a finan-
cial tech company in Austin,
Texas. After watching the shirt-
tugging sketch on “I Think You
Should Leave,” his girlfriend
started teasing him in public
about the quirk.
This apelike tendency to ad-
just our clothing seems to be
pervasive, at least among men.
“Everybody kind of zhuzhes
themselves throughout the day,”
said Dave Soldinger, 37, a TV
producer in Los Angeles. (Popu-
larized by the TV show “Queer
Eye, the term “zhuzh”—usually
pronounced “jooge”—is slang for
“straighten” or “primp.”) Pay at-tention for 15 minutes and you’ll
probably catch yourself shifting
your shirt or tweaking your
pants in some way.
It’s particularly common to
zhuzh in the summer, when a
sweaty T-shirt can adhere to
your abdomen like Saran Wrap.
“Sometimes it might get a little
sticky there,” admitted Mr.
Berkowitz. When that happens,
he flicks his shirt out as a form
of sartorial air conditioning, gen-
erating a “little breeze” inside as
he explained.But the prevalence of the mid-
riff yank also speaks to a reality
about men and clothing that’s
rarely discussed. As we get older,
and/or wider, clothing may not
fit as well as it once did. As Mr.
Robinson, who is 38, said, “You
get older, you get a little gut, and
you get a little self-conscious,
and you tug out your shirt. I
found myself doing it a lot.” It’s
no wonder that in the T.C. Tug-
gers sketch, the men modeling
the shirts aren’t preening teens
but doughy guys creeping into
middle age.
In the postcollege years, your
once-flattish stomach slowly
morphs into a dad mound—and
your clothes don’t really catch up.
Perhaps you’re too lazy to buy
new T-shirts or you just can’t ad-
mit that you no longer wear a size
“small.” Mr. Hermann has had
most of his T-shirts since college.
“Maybe my body has changed
shape a little bit,” he conceded
when pondering his compulsive
attempts to loosen up his decade-
ish old tees. Mr. Soldinger, aware
of nuanced shifts in his behavior,
noted that he’s slightly less dis-
posed to fidget pre-lunch com-
pared with post-lunch: “Some-
times shirts that you put on in the
morning fit differently than they
do at the end of the day based on
what I’m eating.”
At times like that, all he can
do is give his disconcerting shirt
a little tug.‘Yesterday, I noticed
myself absent-mindedly
touching my shirt to
loosen it up around my
midsection.’PULLING A FAST ONEInaskit
from the Netflix sketch comedy
series ‘I Think You Should
Leave with Tim Robinson,’
doughy men tug down on
T-shirts equipped with knobs.NETFLIX; ILLUSTRATIONS: PAOLA NAUGES701 FIFTH AVENUE, 212 399 1000HARRYWINSTON.COM © 2019 Harry Winston SA. PROJECT Z13