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.
Cotton undershirts are for faggots.
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.
DRINK BEER. RAISE HELL. BEAT DEBRA.
The trend changed in 1947 in Detroit, Michigan — when police arrested a local man (James Saddleman, 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 Saddleman, 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.
James "That's a paddlin'" Saddleman
From there, everything snowballed. Men wearing dirty tank-topped undershirts were referred to as people who were “wearing wife-beaters” and the lexicon stuck from that point forward.
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."
Stupid sexy Putin unrelated