The halterneck is the solution to all your wardrobe woes this season
What do you and your style icons from the Y2K-era have in common? A halterneck top!
It’s got to that point in the year when Instagram is awash with carefree holiday draped across the rocky shores of Marseille. Back home, though, the novelty of warm weather is wearing thin – at least from where I’m typing, in my un-air-conditioned flat. The tank tops that felt so full of liberation in May have become uniforms, while those trusty slip dresses don’t look quite so easy-breezy after months of sweat. I’ve become hot, bothered and bored of everything I’ve been wearing.
That is, until I rediscovered the appeal of the halterneck top. A warm weather staple with a little more joie de vivre than the classic spaghetti-strap camisole or ubiquitous white ribbed vest, there’s something about its shoulder-baring, girl-on-a-night-out neckline that makes even the most thrown-together outfit feel considered. Whether worn with a silk skirt, baggy basketball shorts or slouchy cargo trousers, the halterneck is capable of making you look as though you’ve made an effort without really having made any at all. No wonder they dominated the early 2000s.
Indeed, like so many enduring wardrobe staples, the halterneck’s appeal lies in nostalgia. Think Stella McCartney’s tenure at Chloé, which saw scarf-style and rhinestone halters proliferate across the catwalk between 1997 and 2001, with Charlize Theron among their early devotees; Paris Hilton in her 1OAK heyday; and, perhaps most memorably, the metallic, tiger-striped, cowl-neck halterneck Keira Knightley’s character wore on a night out in 2002’s Bend It Like Beckham. It reminds me of something Vogue’s Alice Cary wrote in 2025: “Sparkly, embroidered, beaded, cropped, or all of the above… [it] can convince you to embrace a night that you were otherwise ‘too tired’ for or avoiding due to having ‘nothing to wear’,” she said. “A weapon against your conscience that tells you that you should stay at home.”
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