The Basic Top So Complex, I Bought Two
I've spent my whole life searching for this shirt...
I bought the holy grail of tops; a Rosetta Stone of shirts that has unlocked a simple, yet long-lost sensuality desperately needed in my wardrobe.
This perfect top, the Cleo Tee, is by Cleo Camp, a 26-year-old designer out in Los Angeles whose suede bags were profiled by The New York Times. I first saw the top on my Instagram in a shared image that showed two models in Kind’s reversible black and white tops. (I purchased the black). The pieces are made from that girthy, good-quality cotton found in old Banana Republic or J. Crew pieces. The silhouettes are simple–three-quarter length–with neckline cuts that veer both elegant or insatiable depending on how you wear the shirt.
There is the prim bateau side that cuts across the collarbone. There’s a pared-back politeness with this amount of coverage. It’s off-duty WASP Gwyneth in A Perfect Murder (1998). The other side is cut with a deep, swelled scoop, which is how I prefer to wear the piece. The yawning neckline sweeps across the cleavage, deliciously sloping downward. The cut feels risky, as if there could be a peekaboo of something more. A stolen glance thanks to a slight gash of cleavage. A sliver into the possibilities of sweet, buxom flesh! But the shirt never quite dips that feloniously low. The shirt is simply a powerful visual tickle.
The top is $82, which isn’t cheap. And nor should it be: Camp put a lot of time into the shirt, both in its design and the visuals to promote it. The designer, who cut her teeth assisting costume designer Arianne Philips, made 24 samples of the shirt until she believed it was perfect. Her inspiration? Herself. “When I’m in my studio, I never want to go home to change if I’m going out at night. So I made this shirt that I could reverse from a low back or a low front if I want to switch it up when I'm going out later,” says Camp. “Now I just wear that shirt every single day, and if I go out, I just reverse it to the low-cut side and I bring my high heels with me to the studio, and then see my friends after.”
Camp also released a whole editorial based on this single top: A handful of beautiful people posing in the shirts, all casually contorted to show it at every angle. The hazy imagery reminded me of the studio shots from ‘90s Gap campaigns, which were on Camp’s moodboard. “When we looked at all the photos, I kept saying that they look like ‘Weird Gap’, which I love.” The campaign’s photographer Maddy Rotman, who is inspired by the likes of Elaine Constantine and Steven Meisel, was also behind Camp’s gorgeous bag imagery, in which she added a dreamy, supernatural filter to city rooftops.
The top has since become soldered to me. How could it not be? I’ve always struggled to find basic pieces I wear until the threads unfurl. Specifically, I’ve been scouring the internet for a scoop neck black top since I wrote a piece about The Perfect Black Top in Unfaithful (2002).
Like Camp’s shirt, the Unfaithful top is black with a wide, low neckline. In the film, Diane Lane’s character Connie Sumner wears the shirt at the flagrant height of her affair. During a sultry restaurant scene, as Sumner’s paramour shoves his hand into the back of her jeans, the black top moves with her body, riding her curves. Thanks to the fantastic cut that stretches from shoulder to shoulder and how the neckline dips just a bit too low, the top shows everything and nothing at the same time. It’s never crass. It’s never overt or desperate. There’s a flicker of a bra strap. A slice of the small of the back. A bit more of that shoulder than we should see. The Cleo Tee offers the same effect, and is a reminder that a simple shirt has never been so complex.
Immediate purchase
This shirt owned me before I owned it.