How to wear a white shirt

Bottom line: for most wearers, a white shirt should not be considered a regular go-to shirt, and should not be mistaken for easy to wear. People often assume it is a staple they should stock up on. You need one or two.



mafoofan said:

Bottom line: for most wearers, a white shirt should not be considered a regular go-to shirt, and should not be mistaken for easy to wear. People often assume it is a staple they should stock up on. You need one or two.

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I think if people want a regular go to shirt it should be the light blue shirt.



patrickBOOTH said:

I think if people want a regular go to shirt it should be the light blue shirt.

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I would believe what they (foo/manton) are trying to impart is that, while a strictly business look with a white shirt is fine, other occasions rarely call for one. If you're always all business when you dress up then you can def have a wardrobe of only white shirts. I personally have trouble liking non white shirt business outfits but understand that light blue or white base w. blue stripes is still fine (GDL does this very well because he chooses his ties more carefully than anyone else, IMHO).

Not really the point of this thread so might be confusing: SW&D looks (truly I am talking about modernist runway fashion look AKA old Helmut Lang, Raf Simons, Jil Sander or even non-rocker Dior Homme) often REQUIRES a crisp white shirt because certain schools of thought call for a minimal colour palette (white, grey, black, navy only), an industrial look (so no "handmade" signals) and a lack of discernible pattern (cannot even see the threads, surface looks flat and uniform). To be honest they also call for a specific haircut and a slew of other details that mean most SW&Ders I see attempting that look fail miserably.

I can see the logic in the 2nd graph above, though it goes without saying it is never something I do.



mafoofan said:

Bottom line: for most wearers, a white shirt should not be considered a regular go-to shirt, and should not be mistaken for easy to wear. People often assume it is a staple they should stock up on. You need one or two.

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I still consider white by far the best choice for evening wear, so how many you need depends on how often you're going out.



patrickBOOTH said:

This is my kind of thread. Thanks.

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+1

patrickBOOTH said:

With my navy suits, I always want to wear wedding ties with a white shirt, but it just seems wrong outside of a wedding.

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Personally, I think this is a good look. I bought a "wedding tie" for my wedding, and after letting it sit in the closet for a while, started wearing it again. It looks clean, and is a nice change of pace from my mostly solid tie collection.

RDiaz said:

This is very interesting. White is indeed formal, but what about casual seersucker suits? I find it hard to pair them with anything other than a white shirt.

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Depending on the shade, I like a blue OCBD with seersucker, or if adventurous, a pink OCBD. Either one works with a navy silk knit tie.

mafoofan said:

Bottom line: for most wearers, a white shirt should not be considered a regular go-to shirt, and should not be mistaken for easy to wear. People often assume it is a staple they should stock up on. You need one or two.

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+1000

This is one of the best things I have learned from SF, and various #menswear blogs. It's one of those misconceptions prepetuated by salespeople with little knowledge. I have about a dozen varieties of blues shirts, solids, stripes, mini checks, etc. and only three white shirts, one FC, one BC, one OCBD that is usually for very casual wear (with navy shorts in the summer, or under a sweater in the winter)

patrickBOOTH said:

I think if people want a regular go to shirt it should be the light blue shirt.

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Can I get some clarification here: where do shirts that have a white ground with very narrow checks, stripes, or windowpanes fall? I would assume these don't offend these rules...

I must be satorially de-evolving. When I was younger, I probably owned one white shirt. Now I have around a dozen, and appear to have worn one yesterday and today (with a suit of course: I only wear white shirts with odd jackets in blazer/summery mode and even then rarely).

I like the "crispness", the implied formality, the traditional aspects (50 years ago, almost everyone wore white shirts with suits). I think the colour palette issues are not as clear-cut as has been suggested (a tan helps). And there is a certain conservative business dress simplicity that I increasingly find attractive about a plain suit, subtle tie, white shirt and white square, where the charm is in the details of texture, pattern and weave (I am growing fond of white shirts with a bit of texture to them, like herringbone twills). Or maybe it's just being too lazy to try to match more complex combinations at 7AM.

After white, my staple is light blue. But I am very picky about light blues and mildly dislike half my blue shirts. Most of them are a fraction of a shade too dark, or have the merest hint of RAF blue-grey. A light blue shirt with a bright, warm, sky blue colour is a rare and prized item.

I abhor cream and yellow shirts - on me, they make me look ill, or like I am wearing a white shirt that wasn't washed properly. I buy one every five years or so in the hope that it will be different, and it never is.



Frankie22 said:

A lot of opinion stating thought of as fact by forum elders.
If you don't think my post makes sense, fine -- deleting it would make you an abuser of your power : - )

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You and several others, maybe including some of the “forum elders”, are fundamentally misunderstanding what is going on here and in other similar threads started by the aforementioned elders. While you may see these threads as imparting some sort of absolute, objective and universal set of rules and practices without providing any justification for why it is so (let’s call this the Platonic approach, nothing to do with not getting laid) what you have is in reality similar to Aristotelian ethics. Instead of scrapping what is currently believed to be true and what is put in practice and trying to end up with a new set of absolutely proven rules demonstrated through a long and tedious argumentative chain we start with the end result and work backward, resolving contradictions as we go along. This is called methodological conservatism and is very appropriate for MC. The way it goes is that you acknowledge that you live in a certain society, in a certain time and at a certain place but that what you are trying to do is to give people the tools to deal with that specific context anyway, you make no pretense of going for the absolute and universal (like Plato did) and you don’t attack the whole social edifice anyway but systematize what is the good in this specific context. You go with what the wise (those that are respected and have well thought out opinions) and the many (consensual statements that the populace can easily go for like “we dress to look good”) believe in and work from there to develop a coherent set of principles that others may adopt to have a praxis of dressing well. Now Aristotle was quite adamant that your values were the result of your education and that you weren’t fundamentally virtuous or lacking in virtue, he however basically thought that it was pretty useless to try to change the non-virtuous as they were fucked up for life or something equally silly. It is also why he doesn’t care about justifying certain statements he makes, if you’re an ok dude you’re supposed to agree with him and go along.

Applying this to what is happening in MC should be quite easy but let me spell it out for you: people that are generally recognized as dressing well and making well thought-out points about dressing are dropping knowledge to help the mass of awful to decent MC dressers dress better in an MC context (so no claim to universality, timelessness or any other drivel should be believed to be anything but rhetorical), this also serves them to resolve their diverging opinions and coalesce MC-knowledge into a coherent set of practices that is relatively easily applicable. They will probably fail to help most of you because your aesthetic education was a failure and these things are hard to rectify. Stuff is still interesting. There are several important problems with Aristotelian ethics and the subject/object Cartesian distinction of someone from outside looking in rationally and methodically at the world and making dispassionate observation about objects to learn their properties (Heidegger basically destroyed the whole thing in Being and Time), they also apply here, this isn’t really too important right now as most MCers need such help to grow into looking like something beside Christmas trees of fabric.

^ I think, from following threads over the years, that shirts follow a theory of art history - that something will start of simple and austere, become baroque over time, and then return to a neo-austerity. people seem to start with white shirts, go to patterns, slowly return to whites and then shift to patters again. if you live long enough, I guess you can do this several times.

I just can't get behind white shirts outside occasions where they are absolutely called for.

That is not to say that I don't think others can look good in white shirts - In theory I share Manton's liking for a navy suit, a white shirt, and a conservative tie. Especially for an evening event

Nevertheless I hardly ever turn to my white shirts (not that I have many). As a very fair-skinned, and blonde person a white shirt always seems to drain the colour away from me (for much the same reason I don't wear light grey suits). But it is not just that. I also find white shirts much less versatile than a blue shirt (plain, striped or check) in terms of creating an interesting dialogue with your tie. Next to a white shirt, most blue ties represent - to my mind - too much of a contrast. Being able to play around with different shades and tones of colour is what I enjoy the most - and white being the absence of colour adds very little

That is also why I would, for a evening, be much more inclined to opt for a pink shirt than a white one. Pink next to navy,is to me, one of the best combinations

The only time white feels like this only option is for evening wear. Wearing black, everything else would just feel wrong. That said - when I have my new midnight blue dinner jacket made this autumn i may also have a cream silk dinner shirt made

R-O-T

That is all correct, and really amazing, if I may say, only I for one do not take it for granted that Heidegger was right and Aristotle was wrong. But then, I am a Straussian.



aw82 said:

Can I get some clarification here: where do shirts that have a white ground with very narrow checks, stripes, or windowpanes fall?  I would assume these don't offend these rules...

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What I wrote applies to solid white. Checks with white ground are a whole nother can of worms that perhaps will be addressed later.

I only have one white shirt right now. It's an american oxford with a semi spread collar and I haven't worn it in a while because I don't need to wear suits for work.

In my 20's I probably owned 3-4 white shirts and wore them too much in a business casual environment. Light blue is my go-to shirt now.



Manton said:

That is all correct, and really amazing, if I may say, only I for one do not take it for granted that Heidegger was right and Aristotle was wrong. But then, I am a Straussian.

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I am asking that those reading me leave this part aside anyway as I do believe an ethics of dressing is exactly what is needed in MC and, in a sense, what out readers are asking for.

A decent ( and non-Sartrean, that dickhead) approach to Heidegger is that he didn't so much destroy philosophy that came before him, especially the Descartes/Subject-Object thread that lead to phenomenology/Husserl but rather point that that while the subject/object way of observing the world was appropriate and possible (*that's the hard sciences approach) there was a pre-conscious sociological process at play that 1) meant we didn't need to go for Husserl's (perfect) idea that our perceptions were very real and enough 2) didn't need to question if the world was real because we were already in it and it was an integrated whole and we made sense of it that way (we didn't observe the hammer but used it without much thought toward a purpose and perceived it in relation to certain objects, social processes and end goals, being a carpenter, using nails, going to work etc.). You will in fact, coming back to Aristotle, note that he has in common with Heidegger a profoundly modern approach that is linked to the social sciences and not to the hard sciences like Descartes and his ilk. Aristotle can be used as both the father of very logical conservatism and a useful reference for the very modern to post-modern social sciences approach so he is much richer and valuable in my mind than I usually give him credit for.