Royals baseball, dollar hotdogs, Halter Top Day…
So goes the natural order of things in the wide world of summer sporting events Kansas City Style. Except that the latter of the three – Halter Top Day – won’t be returning to The K this year, according to Royals spokesman Toby Cook.
“No halter tops,” Cook emailed this past week. “Rats.”
Thus for yet another year Halter Top Day will remain little more than a fuzzy, PG13 memory for Kansas City Royals fans of a certain age.
That’s too bad, because even Forbes is forecasting that the much-maligned article of women’s clothing is poised for a fashion comeback.
Just last week, Forbes quoted Forever 21 marketing director Linda Chang as saying that halter tops is one of two “overriding trends” certain to be picked up by the big national chains.
The Royals threatened to bring Halter Top Day back four years ago.
And by some arguable measure they did, but did you see the cheesy Ts they called halter tops and handed out to the first 10,000 women at the game? Basically, the team chickened out rather than deliver the arguably sexist halter tops of the past.
And this is probably why.
“They were infamous,” Cook told me four years ago. “The other infamous thing with the Halter Top Days was the young ladies would go ahead and change into them, especially in the right and left field GA sections – which was not lost on some of the ball players.”
The basic premise of a bunch of old dudes in the Royals front office cooking up schemes to lure young dudes to the stadium in the hopes of catching flashes of female flesh came to be viewed as, you know, sexist.
“Let me put it this way,” former Royals PR czar Mike Levy explained, to me in 1998. “Certain promotions at one time were politically correct and now they’re not.”
The issue of staging a promotion like Halter Top day in these far more politically correct times being basically one of tit-for-tat.
“If we did Halter Top Day, some women would want to have Speedo Day,” Levy quipped. “And that’s just not going to happen.”
This is stupid, those tops compared to what you see today are tame no doubt. Funny I bet if they had one 99% of the women would not refuse to take one.
But I agree Speedo day has to never happen.
Still eagerly awaiting Royals Tube Top Day.
I would probably guess the reason this is not an option anymore is that 70 percent of women are overweight or obese (actually according to NIH it was 64% in 2009-2010, which is their latest data, but I’m guessing it’s going up rather than down). No one really wants to see that. Also, that means more cost, have to use more fabric.
but….really, the reason is no one wants to see a bunch of fat chicks in halter-tops, let alone changing into them. Ladies, stop eating like hippos and mix in a salad. Seriously, 30 years ago there would be one or two fat chicks at the pub. Now it’s the new normal and you have to search far and wide for a girl without a gut. Yuck.
Ouch!
You’re undoubtedly right, but most of the women who would want to wear something sexy like that in public would probably be fairly young still, still single perhaps and maybe not wildly overweight.
The halter tops cover the guy though I think. It’s basically a boob play. So within reason, what’s not to like about that.
And my apologies in advance if I’ve offended, I’m sure that were the shoe on the other foot, we dudes would have plenty of issues of our own.
I thought I was at dollar hot dog night, but it was just the lady’s neck in front of me.
Funny, gross, but funn