106/ Test-Driving The Mens Short-Sleeve Button-Up
Everything I learned from incorporating the menswear staple into my summer outfits!
Last week, the
by landed in my inbox with a bold headline: “Did I Just Solve Summer Dressing?” A quick scan of the photos and I was intrigued.As the title of this piece suggests, she was referring to the utility of the short-sleeve button-up shirt:
Like, maybe I drank too much of the Kool-Aid in my own writing of this piece BUT I wear a lot of long-sleeve button downs year-round and I am shocked that I haven’t thought of getting more short-sleeve button downs to hold me over in the heat of summer.
I guess I’m drinking the Kool-Aid, too, because I thought the same! Given how many of us are rolling up our long-sleeve shirts during the summer months, a short-sleeve version seems like an obvious shortcut, no?
So, for this newsletter, I’m testing out that theory!
As I promised Kelly in her comment section, I started by playing with the existing pieces in my husband’s closet, and my own.
Right off the bat, I had a few key insights:
None of my husband’s slim fit short sleeve shirts felt right to me. They’re tailored at the shoulders and tapered through the torso resulting in a relatively fitted body, with relatively large arm holes, and strong shoulders. The proportions were all wrong.
Similarly, I have a couple of women’s “relaxed” short-sleeve button-ups which are slimmer in the torso and shorter in the sleeve and in overall length. They each felt like a shrunken version of what I was envisioning.
In both cases, the tops were lacking in the ease I was hoping for. To that end, I knew I wanted a more relaxed fit through the body. And, given the tailored shoulders of my husband’s slim shirts, I figured that a soft, unstructured, or even dropped shoulder would work better, otherwise the shirt would feel too boxy.
With these two key points in mind, I searched online and — I guess because the short-sleeve button-up is so foundational to a man’s summer wardrobe — I found far more eased options for men than for women. Not that they don’t exist for women…they do! Like these from Marine Serre, Loulou Studios, and H&M.1 But, overall, the mens section has a greater range of fabrics, colours and prints to choose from so I decided to stick to just menswear for this newsletter.
Let’s start with the short-sleeve shirt as a beach cover-up, since a rolled up, long-sleeve version is my swim time go-to: