Re-Discovering the White Dress Shirt

I’ve dismissed white dress shirts for about a decade now, and I’m finally coming out of my bias against them.

See, years ago, Styleforum culture and blog advice convinced me and a lot of other guys who were getting into tailored menswear that the light blue dress shirt was more stylish than the white one. Sure, if you were wearing a dark gray or navy suit, a white shirt made sense, the line of reasoning went, but given the garment’s historical association with dressier forms of dress (only wealthy people who didn’t have working class jobs could wear white shirts 100 years ago because they were so hard to keep clean, and white is the only acceptable shirt color for black tie and white tie), blue was argued to be the more versatile, more stylish and more attractive choice. Plus, if you had a more pale complexion, white tends to wash you out, they said.

I bought into that line of thinking. For several years, I sought to buy a single white shirt that would fulfill the entirety of my needs for one, whether that be the occasional funeral or dressier nighttime event—”the ultimate white dress shirt”, I called it. Meanwhile, my blue and blue stripe shirt collection ballooned into the dozens.

Lately, though, the veil has been lifted off my eyes. For one, a white Oxford cloth button down is an all-time classic that stylish men for more than a half century have worn casually to great effect. Gus Walbolt, one of the best dressers out there (who wore Ivy League at an Ivy school during the time period of its ascendancy in the mid-20th Century) hails the combination of a white shirt (OCBD or otherwise) and worn, faded denim as one of the all time best outfits a man can wear. I’ve come to agree.

Gus Walbolt wearing a white shirt casually with denim

And to be honest, those historical perspectives on dressing—understanding the urban or rural origins of certain fabrics, types of dress, colors and textures—are a prison if you let them be. Once I realized that clothing changes to meet the needs of people—tweed is just an original form of technical fabric designed to guard against wind and thorns; oiled or bonded cotton was the best they could do 100 years ago to protect against the rain; brogue boots were originally made with holes so that they’d let water drain out while a person was stomping out and about in the marshy countryside—I finally have been able to allow myself to let clothing serve my needs, rather than try to fit myself into some idealized mode of dressing I had created in my mind.

Don’t get me wrong, I still know what I love and dress to that as often as I can (soft shouldered Italian sport coats, high-collar cutaway shirts, slim straight trousers or jeans and usually suede leather-bottom shoes, plus or minus a few accessories or layers). But by allowing myself to open up the rules I was dressing by—whether that be, as in this case, wearing a white shirt with faded jeans, or wearing sneakers with dress trousers, or wearing a tee under a tailored jacket—I’m finding more satisfaction in dressing than I have in years.

And in the end, that’s as worthy a goal for getting dressed as any.