Once an essential of the British wardrobe deemed so useful that the military tested its operational merits, the string vest will soon be consigned to fashion history.

Its greatest recent ambassador having been the layabout Rab C. Nesbitt, and having been shunned by all except Ricky Tomlinson’s slovenly Jim in the sitcom The Royle Family, it has been withdrawn from sale by major clothing retailers such as Asda and Tesco, homes of the cut-price boxer short.

Changing fashion tastes and that nemesis of male slobbishness – women – are apparently to blame for the string vest’s demise. Ed Watson, spokesman for Asda, said: “While a string vest looks good on a man when he is fit, slim and well-muscled, it simply reveals too much flesh when things begin to sag,” he said. “The unobscured view of bulging waistlines, hairy chests and – worst of all – sweaty armpits, placed prominently on display by the baggy, open-structured string vest was too much for many wives and girlfriends to bear.”

A spokeswoman for Tesco said: “I would love to say that there’s a lot of holes in this story, but the truth is that we don’t sell them any more either. I haven’t seen anyone wearing one for a long, long time.”

String underwear seems to have been invented by a Norwegian army commander, Henrik Brun, when in 1933 he sewed together his first set from old fishing nets. Net became cotton, and the vests, which work remarkably well by trapping insulating pockets of air close to the skin, soon became a hit.

By the 1950s they were worn by everyone from schoolboys to seaside holidaymakers, whose sartorial elegance was so often completed by a knotted handkerchief and deckchair.

In 1955, a year before the Suez crisis, gentlemen of the Directorate of Physiological and Biological Research of the Ministry of Supply (Clothing and Stores Experimental Establishment) conducted detailed tests into the string vest’s utility in keeping soldiers cool on hot battlefields. Soldiers, it seems, did not like wearing vests, and the report noted that “efficient indoctrination and a generous period of experience are important”.

A decade later, women caught on to the string vest craze. Brigid Keenan, writing in The Sunday Times in October 1964, noted: “It started this summer . . . You would have thought this dotty holiday idea might die out with the winter, but it hasn’t. The holey stringy look has become fashionable for sweaters and stockings, and now real string vests have even been made into evening dresses.”

From those dizzy heights of fashion, it could only be downhill. According to Asda, sales have in the past two years dwindled to virtually nil.

Hope does remain. Yesterday Marks & Spencer insisted that reports of the string vest’s death were exaggerated, claiming that its mesh string number was among the most popular of the 25 vests it sells every minute.

Indeed, last year 76-year-old John Clarke somehow managed to sell two pairs of vintage St Michael briefs and a string singlet, bought in 1969, for £273 on eBay.

While vintage vests might appeal to collectors, a dwindling band of modern men see string as a stylish choice. According to Sarah Dolan-Abrahams, menswear buyer for the underwear retailer figleaves.com, the string vest “conjures up images of grandfathers or gangster-rappers – neither of which are aspirational for many of today’s men”.

Fashion victim

— A string vest accentuates muscle, but also flab. Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine, the TV fashion gurus, have warned men with “man boobs” to avoid them

— Jennifer Lopez, Madonna, Sting, Kylie Minogue and 50 Cent have all worn string vests

— Michaela Strachan once hosted a programme called Electric String Vest for the Children’s Channel

— Sir Jimmy Savile joked after a woman stole the glasses off his nose last month: “To any other girls who want souvenirs, I wear a snazzy line of string vests”

— The 1980s fashion for wearing a string vest over a T-shirt enjoyed a revival this summer

Source: Times database