‘Challengers’: Zendaya, JFK Jr., and the Viral ‘I Told Ya’ T-Shirt
Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers is a lot deeper than the “Zendaya-has-a-sexy-threesome” marketing would have had us believe. At its core, it’s a dark portrait of a woman grasping for a taste of her lost love (not a man, but tennis) by engaging in a frenetic, tactical game of back-and-forth (not tennis, but sex).
After I saw a screening of Challengers, I left contemplating the film’s nuanced take on power and obsession—and, bizarrely, my mind kept drifting back to one specific T-shirt. The deceptively simple T-shirt—marl gray with I TOLD YA sprawled across the chest—appears three times on two different characters in Challengers. It has since been replicated on multiple occasions throughout the film's press tour, and today, Loewe has announced an entire “I TOLD YA” collection inspired by the shirt.
What does it mean? Why is this shirt so significant? Could it perhaps hold the key to the film's complex dynamics? These are the questions keeping me up at night, so, I bring you something absolutely no one asked for: the ultimate deep dive into the I TOLD YA shirt from Challengers. I give you fair warning—this is a complicated, multi-layered sartorial journey and you might not like where we end up.