White shirts. Really!
Summer is for white shirts. Why they're good. Why they're bad. A question about a movie title.
Read time: about 8 minutes. This week: White shirts in their glory, maybe with bad connotations? Next week: Sex robots. What else? A follow up to an earlier post on empathetic machines.
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If you’re like me, your shoes have gathered dust in the closet. Your thoughts about garb have tended toward consideration of comfort rather than who you’re seeing during the day or what activities you’ll knock off after quitting time. Because, after all, you weren’t seeing anyone, except maybe from the shoulders up.
Changes we underwent in 2020 continue to send signals in dress even as the pandemic begins to recede. For men, neckties have stayed in the closet, if they hadn’t already gathered dust there. For women, painful shoes remain perched on the shoe rack. Through most of 2020, all of 2021, and into this year, below the waist soft fabrics and sweatpants became de rigueur — or close to it. Some Brady-Bunched Zoomers chanced working in underwear or less, if they felt confident about the aim of their web cameras. Some, of course, could do better in the aiming department.
Office fashion debates began as employers agonized when or, really, whether offices should be reopened or whether management’s decision was final. We all watched “final” decisions descend into iffy-ness — not that many actually cared about “going back in” and again facing a commute.
But still … Was it to be loose-fitting or skinny jeans? Colors, bright or subdued? Comfortable, or not? Upgraded but barely acceptable sweats? Mom jeans? Dad pants? Or maybe “Joy Dressing”? Does comfort really matter — in whatever form that might take on a male body — or does dressing “up” have any use whatsoever?
And who was deciding all of this, anyway?
About a year ago, Joy Dressing was apparently A Thing for women, according to the Wall Street Journal’s Katherine K. Zarrella, who coined the term for the explosion of bright colors and bold designs in women’s clothing. She pointed to Mindy Homer, a 40-something New York dentist. Homer, Zarrella writes, “might not see the pair of ‘flamingo’ shoes she bought in February as a symbol of personal renaissance, but they do boost her mood. ‘As soon as I saw them, I felt happy,’ said Ms. Homer of the pink Sophia Webster shoes whose heels take the form of blush-colored water birds.” In July 2021 Sweden’s comfy and already quite colorful clothes designer Gudrun Sjödén decided to “go wilder” with a sale that promised to “drench your summer in color!” The Swedes turned it up to 11, apparently.
The colors may have faded when Omicron restated pandemic woe.
White light scatters into rainbows
I get “Joy Dressing,” but I want to sing the praises of the brightest color — or, I suppose, the non-color. Despite the constant danger of a coffee spill, a drip of salad dressing or tomato sauce, a smudge of mysterious origin, I’m all for white clothing this summer and fall. Perhaps considering those smudges, Elisabeth Wagner observed that the history of the white shirt “is linked to privileges, to the possibility of leading a life that does not come too close to the shirt…. As a shirt of the modern age, it lays claim to all. It goes to work and, after the office, to the cinema.” Such was probably the case with Paul Mellon in 1924, whose portrait by William Orpen is featured on this post. The son of Andrew W. Mellon, he could stay away from much of life’s dreck.
But a white shirt also indicates a clean competence — well depicted in Orpen’s “Le Chef de l’Hôtel Chatham, Paris” where Eugène Grossriether proudly stands before a work table filled with materials of life that come very close to his clean white shirt. Cuts of meat. A bloody knife. A wineglass filled, perhaps, with dark beer. The chef is in command of his kitchen and nothing soils his shirt, and the chef’s posture plays with earlier depictions of the powerful. His elbows cocked, he occupies his space, his glance aside with lips firmly closed.
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Actually, the white shirt appeals especially to men, who have traditionally tucked wild colors — when they appear at all — in specific places: on ties, of course, but also on socks. In other words, color goes in those areas of dress where they are easily covered, either entirely (socks) or mostly (ties). The most flashily sartorial fellows have long adventured into bright coats and shirts, but it seems they hardly need a reason or a season to do so.
In the 1960s, Cary Grant wrote an article on men’s clothes for The Week magazine, later reprinted in GQ in winter 1967/68 and again online in April 2013. His essay expresses a thorough middle-of-the-road-ism: “In all cases, the most reliable style is in the middle of the road — a thoughtful sensible position in any human behavior. Except perhaps on the freeway — but, even then, the middle lane, providing of course, it’s on your side of the road, usually gets you where you’re going more easily, comfortably, and less disturbingly. And so it should be with clothes. They should be undisturbing, easy and comfortable.”
Grant considered the white shirt as middle-of-the-road as the white centerline on a highway. And yet, his moderation hardly seems appropriate to the current tumultuous situation. Why not? And what might the white shirt have to do with our next venture into the office, if it ever takes place?
The answer, oddly enough, is that the white shirt has become the bold shirt. Its dazzle contrasts and sets off colors. Far from being a dour response to feminine Joy Dressing, the white shirt illumines, providing a foundation for colors, even if the color is black, grey, or Navy Blue. I’ll wear mine unadorned for a while at least, ornamented on occasion with a bow tie, even though neckties are said to be the new bow tie. Habits die hard. A jacket? I’ll don it for the warmth, mostly.
Why do so many of us obsess about clothing?
With its reorientation of work, home, and social connection, the pandemic brought us to a point where we can more clearly see the social purposes of clothing. Questions of fashion consider whether clothing functions in utilitarian and “efficient” ways or expresses aesthetic values. The two domains — efficient/utilitarian and aesthetic — often conflict. Perhaps they even mostly conflict in how they place value on clothing. Is “fashion” frivolous? Should clothes be valued for their utility (that is, how well or cheaply or effectively they serve as garb)? Does beauty or its utilitarian counterpoint eroticism matter? Through such conflict arises our broader discussion of fashion, clothes, and “self-presentation,” and like many such conflicts, may reveal more about us as observers than about the clothing we observe.
We obsess about clothing because through it we create a world where we “make an impression.” In doing so, we add our voice to how a post-pandemic world should be. Clothing has social, personal, and emblematic meaning.
Clothing has long been a signal for social standing, and indeed sometimes its signaling has been rigorously regimented and enforced. Today, the social role of clothing very apparent in uniforms, where garb reflects belonging and status. In the military, uniform dress and its variations and baubles separate members of higher authority from the regular conscript or enlistee; but the principle shows up just as clearly in hospitals, where scrubs and white coats (sometimes with varying length) map out responsibility and order.
The history of the white shirt in particular entwines with privilege. Marie Antoinette chose to be depicted in a 1783 portrait in a white cotton robe de gaulle — “essentially her underwear” as Amy De Klerk put it in an article in Harper’s Bazaar. Royals are trend setters, and Marie Antoinette’s fashion choice caught on, with the effect of ramping up demand and decreasing prices of already inexpensive cotton cloth, cheap because of slave labor.
Women wearing white cotton waned a bit after the Parisian rage for cotton subsided, but it did re-emerge in the 1920s, again in France, with Coco Chanel and other women’s clothes designers. Hollywood glamour added to the embrace of the white shirt, and today it is a fashion staple — part of “the history of the hero” in women’s fashion.
Marie Antoinette’s robe de gaulle points out a dark side to the bright white shirt, and here we can see some of the emblematic qualities and consequences of garb come forth. Caroline London claimed that economic circumstances and oppressive institutions made Marie Antoinette’s fashion influence all the greater in unintended ways.
Technology and slave labour made it affordable. It was the perfect storm. The affordability increased the desirability, resulting in an even higher demand, which in turn increased the mass production so that the price dropped even further…. The cycle caused “King Cotton,” and the institution of slavery which it stood upon, to rule the South. Of course, we all know what happened from there.
Through such displays, the white shirt was associated with privilege and, by other pathways intended or not, with oppression. Artists have noted the connection, and it is even lurking in Orpen’s portrait of “Le Chef de l’Hôtel Chatham, Paris.” And they have developed the associations into emblematic meanings. In A Man Called Ove, Fredrik Backman uses “the man in a white shirt” to signal faceless bureaucratic powers. “And one couldn't fight them. Not only did they have the state on their side, they were the state.” (The movie adaptation, written and directed by Hannes Holm, is worth watching.)
I suspect, though I’ve not established, that Rolands Kalniņš’ Četri balti krekli (1967) was given the title Four White Shirts in reference to the bureaucratic and judgmental “Youth Aesthetic Education Committee” or its superiors who probably donned white shirts in a manner similar to Ove’s “man in the white shirt.” The film was censored in the 1960s in the USSR, so it had to wait twenty years before it was screened. In 2017 it was re-released, all polished up for the “cinema.” I’ll track it down and see it eventually.
I’ll wear a white shirt not to signal privilege or power or conformity but because white is cool in summer. And bright.
Have you seen Four White Shirts? What’s the reference? I’m anxious to find out.
Tags: fashion, white shirt, post-pandemic, work culture
Links, cited and not, some just interesting
Wagner, Elisabeth. “Weißes Hemd: Jetzt ein Zeichen der Zuversicht.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, April 1, 2021, sec. Mode & Design. Accessed April 1, 2021. https://www.faz.net/1.7263978.
Zarrella, Katharine K. “Why ‘Joy Dressing’ Is Summer’s Biggest Fashion Trend.” Wall Street Journal, May 28, 2021, sec. Life. https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-joy-dressing-is-summers-biggest-fashion-trend-11622220985.
Klerk, Amy De. “The History of the Hero: The White Shirt.” Harper’s Bazaar, July 27, 2020. https://www.harpersbazaar.com/uk/fashion/a32904745/history-white-shirt/.
London, Caroline. “The Marie Antoinette Dress That Ignited the Slave Trade.” Racked, January 10, 2018. https://www.racked.com/2018/1/10/16854076/marie-antoinette-dress-slave-trade-chemise-a-la-reine.
Aiano, Zoe. “Rolands Kalniņš’ Four White Shirts (Četri Balti Krekli, 1967).” Review. East European Film Bulletin (blog), December 2018. https://eefb.org/retrospectives/rolands-kalnins-four-white-shirts-cetri-balti-krekli-1967/.
“Our Very Own Godard: Rolands Kalniņš’ Four White Shirts.” Accessed April 18, 2022. https://eng.lsm.lv/article/culture/culture/our-very-own-godard-rolands-kalnins-four-white-shirts.a289615/.