Dress shirts are one of the items of clothing in any guy’s wardrobe that you just can’t do without. You might not have to wear a suit to work anymore, but there are the occasional formal events where you need to be looking nice. Dress shirts of today have flexibility, too. You can wear them with suits and without, with ties and without, and, given the right shirt, with tuxedos down to a cool pair of shorts.
Kesha McLeod, a stylist and visual architect who styles the likes of P.J Tucker, James Harden, and Serena Williams, has been playing with the idea of a dress shirt in her work.
“When you start thinking about what dress shirts really are, you often think about them under a suit or with a dressy element,” says McLeod. “In recent years, dress shirts have become part of that business casual dress: two buttons undone, rolled-up sleeves, or pairing them with jeans and sneakers for Sunday brunch.
That’s the thing with dress shirts: They’re not going away, merely evolving. Yes, a formal shirt is necessary when the situation calls for it, but you can get away with having maybe one go-to formal shirt and a few more less stuffy dress shirts instead.
