Pictured in a file photo from 1988 accompanied by "...the shrew that bought the damn thing for me."
PASADENA, CA – The first straight man to wear a pink shirt died here yesterday of an over-inflated sense of fashion. He was 58.
Joseph Strawser gained fame in the fashion world when he became the first straight man to cross the color barrier and wear a pink shirt in public.
“It was a polo shirt, Lacoste I think, you know, the one with the little alligator on it,” said Jane Strawser, his wife of 25 years. “He wore it at a golf outing on June 14, 1983.”
W Magazine, the fashion industry’s bible, published numerous articles in the weeks following the trend-setting incident. There was a wide range of speculation on why Mr. Strawser decided to wear his pink shirt and subject himself to comments about “his masculinity.”
Some fashion-police columnists wrote that Mr. Strawser donned the pink shirt because he was color blind. Some said his wife nagged him into finally wearing it. Other observers said he was bravely trying to set a new fashion statement, while many quietly said he was really gay, but just wouldn’t admit it.
Mrs. Strawser, in an interview in the Dec. 1983 issue of Vogue, defended her husband. “Joseph is certainly not gay. No one would think that. Just look him. He could be Tom Selleck’s twin.”
Some years later, when it was not considered shocking to see a straight man in a pink shirt, the Pasadena Post-Weekly-Dispatch wrote a brief story on Mr. Strawser commenting on the ten-year anniversary of the “fashionable” occasion.
“I’m really not that much of a celebrity,” the paper quoted Mr. Strawser. “My wife bought the (pink polo) shirt for me for Christmas. She didn’t know better, and I thought it was a little queer, so I just left it in the closet. On my golf day it just happened it was the only clean or decent-smelling shirt I had. The guys at the course gave me some crap about (wearing) it. But I won the round, so I guess that proved to them I wasn’t gay, and they shut up.
“I probably never would have worn (the pink polo) again, but I got so many compliments from the ladies I decided to wear it all the time. A couple of my bar buddies got jealous of all the attention I was getting, so they started wearing them, too.”
Sandy Friedman, a fashion historian for W Magazine, said the pink shirt phenomenon started catching on in southern California by the end of 1983. The trend moved to South Beach Miami and New York by summer 1984 before slowly moving through the other states. Ms. Friedman notes that on Sept. 14, 2008, Timothy Cooper was the first straight man in Detroit to wear a pink shirt. Detroit was the final metro area in the country to embrace pink.
“Detroit is usually the last major city for fashion trends to hit,” said Ms. Friedman “In fact, the Motor City sometimes never sees some of the shorter-lived fashion statements – they just die out before even make it there.”
On the late husband, Mrs. Strawser said: “He was very modest about his fame. He didn’t wear it on his sleeve. But he was fond of saying, ‘If I only had a nickel for every guy who put on a pink shirt I’d have a lot of money.’”
