“The Power of the Subway Shirt: A Reflection on Clothing and Visibility in Public Spaces”

Katrin Swartenbroux is a journalist.

If there is a word for the feeling that overwhelms you when something that has been part of your world for decades suddenly turns out to have a name, it must have been invented by the Germans. Yet my most recent confrontation with the phenomenon was presented to me by a New Yorker in his twenties. The “subway shirt,” damn it.

I’ve been pulling it out every summer morning for years. It is usually, actually, a shirt, but sometimes also a cardigan or a light rain jacket, but never a jeans jacket, because you don’t stuff that easily away once you get off the tram. Subway shirts are all the pieces of clothing you use to cover yourself on public transport, the opaque protective film that not only protects your flesh against bacteria (such a bare back on a subway seat? Horrific!) but above all against looks and greedy body parts. A thin layer against what dares to call itself civilization.

‘Just wear what you want’ looks especially nice in the mirror of your own bedroom, because unfortunately the human body does not exist in a vacuum. All too often a body seems to be a public property, free to spit on, poke at and comment on. And so you take everything, or at least one extra piece of clothing, out of the closet to arm yourself against it.

For the time being, only young women flash across my screen under the hashtag subwayshirt, but transgressive behavior is of course not only their turn. Days after Pride, anecdotes trickle in from people who were booed on the way to and from Pride (or simply, under their selfie on social media) because of their clothing. A person may think that we are a free country, or at least a country where everyone should be able to wear what they feel good about, no matter how revealing, revealing or gender-affirming that outfit may be, but then you probably don’t have Twitter account. And so a subway shirt seems sad, but defensible.

Presenting a piece of clothing as a solution, however, is grist to the mill of critics, and rather useless if clothing is not really the problem.

Research shows that the motivation for behavior such as catcalling, chasing or prolonged intimidating eye contact has nothing to do with perpetrators, but with power. The fact that this power is still too often exercised on young women, trans people or queers, is therefore incredibly telling about how ‘equal’ this society really is.

It is, among other things, why initiatives such as Pride remain sorely needed, and why some also make it a point to participate in them dressed extravagantly. It is taking up space and sometimes even claiming space, and with that also the right to exist. Not “look at me.” Especially ‘see me’. The words already exist, but no one seems to listen.