One Shirt, 365(+) Lives

The Superposition of style, and the one wardrobe essential that deserves its own newsletter.

A few weeks ago, I was out on my morning walk when I spied a woman walking toward me—I didn’t know her, but she was wearing jeans (could be Khaite, could be Wranglers, hard to tell), a baseball cap pulled down covering her brows, and an oversized pinstriped menswear shirt I could see peeking out from underneath a chunky Irish wool cardigan (that I immediately wanted).

Even though I wear some version of this exact outfit nearly every day, I got that goose-bumpy feeling when I see someone else’s outfit that I love. Something about it wakes me up, brings me to full attention. Because even though I didn’t know this person, I could tell just from seeing them moving along down the sidewalk that they knew themselves.

That’s kind of what a striped menswear shirt is for me…an identification card. A genetic marker. A part of my insides that finally at the ripe old age of my mid ‘40s, began embracing this piece of myself and what I love about wearing this particular kind of shirt. That it’s historically uniform-ulaic and yet offers innumerable ways to wear it. We can ALL recall years ago when Jenna Lyons began talking about striped shirts and other cornerstones of menswear in a way that so many of us could relate to. Suddenly, there was this open invitation to merge and fuck around with these formerly binary ideas about dressing…and shopping and clothes (something we thrifters ALWAYS seem to gravitate to). I think that’s why her time at J. Crew was so important—and everlasting. Because she and her team picked up on facets of women like me that were always kind of hidden…or in conflict. Women who didn’t always feel feminine or sexy or appealing in a particularly expected male-gaze way. Women who had something to say with our clothes but perpetually felt like outsiders in the process.

I started collecting good quality vintage menswear striped shirts along my thrifting routes—gallery of outfits and shopping links below ⬇️ for a multitude of evidence. Mostly traditional banker/maritime stripes in blue and white. Occasionally the weight of the stripe would vary, but mostly it was just one classic striped shirt after another. At one point my collection was so out of control, I sold a pile of them at one of my garage sales with my friend Stacy London. And it was both weird and cool and wonderful to see all these other people trying on my cherished shirts with their own outfits.

Striped shirts ruling the roost.

While I was snooping around the internet doing some research for this story, I found this quote…that somehow captures something about this heritage print that I’ve always known but really couldn’t put into words…

“In the stripe, there is something that resists enclosure within systems.”

—Michel Pastoureau, from The Devil’s Cloth

That’s me or WAS me in my ‘40s….beginning to feel this constant tug to resist all the rules and expectations and pressure to feel sexy and beautiful and compact and young and successful…in perpetuity. As we approach Election Day and the very REAL possibility of inaugurating our first woman President, it feels even more important to be exploring this kind of everyday personal resistance. Against dressing for anyone but YOU and who we want to be and do in THIS particular moment in time. And, finally, fully inhabiting the power and agency those classical striped shirts formerly imbued exclusively to men.

(FWIW, I was reminded recently that I greatly enjoy wearing my stripes with all manner of black sheer bras. If you like lace—DO lace, if you love silk—SILK it is. Or if you just love a sportier vibe, I’m right there with you.)

Not sexy. Not really.