So the question has to be asked: besides just being good ol’ fashioned eye candy, why are there so many men in wet shirts in period dramas?
The most basic explanation is that men simply wore a lot of white shirts during the Regency-period. Dress historian Dr. Alanna McKnight notes that “men’s dress shirts were also used as their nightshirts in the early 19th century, [so] it would’ve been considered unusual for a man to remove his shirt for anything other than laundering.” This would explain why Michael Fassbender’s dreamy Mr. Rochester is wearing one inafter being awoken by a fire , and Firth’s Mr.
There’s also a false assumption made by modern film and TV producers that women of the past were sexually repressed. Hence the not-quite-nude wet shirt’s popularity. “The shirt, albeit wet and clingy, means the man is still dressed, and the chaste woman remains free of the sin of gazing upon the male figure.”, Anthony’s fall into the lake could represent the fact that he is falling in love with Kate. His costume, designed by Ellen Mirojnick, takes this idea a step further.
But perhaps the best explanation for all the men wearing wet white shirts in period dramas is the female gaze. Think about it — most of the productions are based on books written by women for women , and the story is told from a female perspective. The heroines have depth and agency and are not merely objects of desire, as is often the case with the male gaze. Because of this, there’s a role reversal, and the male leads tend to take on a more sexualized role.
And if we’re being honest, cinema has had a long and problematic history with the male gaze and female nudity. Whether it’s done tastefully or not, the ratio of naked women to naked men on screen is highly unbalanced. Think of these scenes in period dramas as a turning of the tables for the post-“wet t-shirt contest” era.But McKnight challenges the assumption that women prefer to consume media where nudity is thinly veiled behind a damp button-down.
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