The outfit is audacious in its simplicity, daring in its insistence on ease. You can look at the t-shirt and believe that perhaps she just slung it on. On Paltrow, casualness suggests confidence. Somehow, on her, the t-shirt is laid back without ever reading as sloppy. A white t-shirt is the opposite of overthinking it, and so that year Paltrow leaned on hers for several red carpet occasions. She wore it with a long, gunmetal grey skirt; with black velvet trousers and a luxurious matching blazer. As the weather turned colder, she layered a white t-shirt underneath a pearlescent Calvin Klein coat and playfully paired it with sneakers. A white t-shirt is a blank canvas that can, of course, be dressed up, but there’s a power in using it to dress down.

In Hollywood, the white t-shirt has always had star power. In the 1950s, male movie stars were starting to shrug off their starched dress shirts in favour of the hipper and more comfortable t-shirt. With that ease of physical movement came the ability to shake off social restrictions, too. In 1955, James Dean’s troubled teenager Jim Stark transformed the t-shirt into a symbol of youthful revolt. The same year saw Sidney Poitier wearing a white crew neck t-shirt in his breakout film, Blackboard Jungle. A melodrama about delinquent students set in an interracial school, it starred Poitier as a sharp and musically gifted high schooler. Authority figures remained buttoned up. Rebels, on the other hand, wore t-shirts.

There are many ways to wear a white t-shirt, but in Grease, John Travolta wore his with swagger. Set in 1958 but released on the cusp of the 80s, Travolta’s bad boy Danny Zuko seduces Olivia Newton-John’s Sandy in a snug white t-shirt. It’s the official dress code of the T-Birds, his gang of rock ‘n’ roll greasers. A few years later, in 1986, Tom Cruise wore his fitted, pristine white t-shirt with aviator sunglasses, as a renegade pilot in Top Gun. An unfussy, practical white t-shirt made sense as an action hero’s costume; it had become an avatar of slick, all-American cool. It’s worth noting that Bruce Willis doesn’t spend all of Die Hard in a vest – he also wears a t-shirt – and in Speed, Keanu Reeves wears one too.