Carmen Miranda T-Shirt

The fruit, the turban, the platform heels, and a stage presence that made her the highest-paid woman in Hollywood by the middle of the 1940s.

She was Portuguese by birth and Brazilian by upbringing, she recorded hundreds of sides in Rio before America had heard of her, and the tutti-frutti hat from The Gang’s All Here in 1943 is the image that survived — which she had complicated feelings about, having been accused at home of selling a cartoon of Brazil abroad and finding herself typecast in exactly that cartoon. She was a serious musician playing a costume.

Daddy’s reading is that anybody who builds an image that strong deserves to be worn on purpose rather than as kitsch.

The shirt itself is the good kind of basic: combed ring-spun cotton, preshrunk, side-seamed so it hangs straight, taped shoulders so the collar doesn’t twist after the fortieth wash. It fits like the tee you’ve had for ten years, on day one.

How to wear it

White or black tee, pale trousers, in summer. It is a warm-weather shirt and it knows it.