First, we must address the origins of said “wife beater” shirts. Whether or not you know it, the history of the “wife beater” goes back to the Middle Ages, where knights who lost their armor in battles often had nothing but the chain-mail undergarment to protect them. Now, those chain mail undershirts, if you will, were damn strong — even a sword couldn’t get through. Often, when a knight lost their armor and continued to fight successfully, they were referred to as a waif beater (waif, referring to an abandoned or lost individual). Due to the fact that knights who had been abandoned and continued to fight with only the “shirt off their back” (albeit chain mail), they were given this noble title — an abandoned fighter, beating their way through battle.
During 1700’s Europe, of course, the phrase “waif beater” no longer had much meaning due to the fact that there weren’t really knights running around fighting battles in chain-mail undershirts. As a result, the phrase was changed to the similarly sounding “wife beater” and used to refer to husbands who treated their significant others in a less than stellar way.
The trend changed in 1947 in Detroit, Michigan — when police arrested a local man (James Hartford, Jr.) for beating his wife to death. Local news stations aired the arrest and elements of the case for months after — constantly showing a picture of Hartford, Jr. when he was arrested — wearing a dirty tank top with baked bean stains on it…and constantly referring to him as “the” wife beater.
From there, everything snowballed. From then on, men wearing dirty tank-topped undershirts were referred to as people who were “wearing wife-beaters” and the lexicon stuck from that point forward.
http://www.pauldavidson.net/2005/05/13/words-for-your-enjoyment-wife-beaters/
The slang seems to have come from a healthy sense of self-mockery, as teens across the nation slipped into something comfortable, looked at themselves in the mirror, and said "Ughh. I look like someone you would see drinking and belching and smacking his wife on Cops." Quite a few forays into the etymology of wife beater also mention Stanley Kowalski (from A Streetcar Named Desire) or Ralph Kramden (from TV's The Honeymooners).
The name wife beater is growing more and more popular, raising the concerns of many victims' rights groups that naming a popular article of clothing after an incident of domestic violence desensitizes young people to violence against women. However, many slang experts argue that, far from glamorizing domestic violence, this tongue-in-cheek name mocks the self-conscious machismo of the upper-class teen as he struggles to evoke the blue-collar image of another time and place.
Both the fashion trend and the nomenclature seem to have settled in for an extended stay, but I wouldn't get too comfortable with either. Whatever reason you may have for talking about 'beaters, or (gasp!) wearing them, you may expect some flak. Maybe it's time to embrace a new trend. You know, I hear they are making capri pants for men this season.
http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=20000706
