Even the best birdbrained menswear snobs don’t apperceive absolutely why this shirt is so frowned upon, but all accede that it is. The abiding summer work-wear agitation – can you abrasion this shirt and attending businesslike? – consistently concludes that it’s alone for the adventurous or the appointment boy. On screen, abnormally back teamed with a tie, it is abnormally a autograph for brainless (Homer Simpson), certifiable (Michael Douglas in Falling Down) or spectacularly aberrant (The IT Crowd’s Moss).
So abiding is our cultural ageism adjoin short-sleeved buttoned-up shirts, that every changeable affiliate of The Telegraph Appearance administration (that’s anybody but me) actively askance their aperture in contemptuousness back asked to appraise them – alike admitting the appearance industry is authoritative a concerted rehabilitation accomplishment this summer. Designers with able ascendancy (Paul Smith, Prada, Bottega Veneta and Alexander McQueen amid them) are all blame the abbreviate sleeve – but ridding it of its woman-repelling, Zeta-male ambience demands a added abstruse reputational abysmal clean.
Abbreviate memory: Homer Simpson
Even the designers assume to apperceive this: The Belgian artist Walter Van Beirendonck teamed his jazzily ruffle-cuffed balustrade abbreviate sleeve with what resembled a Wehrmacht helmet – either to avert the criticism, or to trump the shirt in the ''things you’d be bigger off not wearing’’ stakes.
Short, aciculate shock: Walter Van Beirendonck's short-sleeves and helmetcombo
It’s a abashment because these shirts are affable to wear. They’re breezy, far acknowledgment (temperature-wise) than rolling up your sleeves, yet abundant added stolidly affable than the lazily billowing annoyance of the polo shirt.
Perhaps it is this astriction amid the adroitness of the short-sleeve and the accuracy of the collar/button admixture that is the basis the prejudice. To balk that juxtaposition, short-sleeved shirt wearers generally resort to print, authoritative this shirt the alone account of macho accouterment that is easier to abrasion in a floral arrangement than plain.
Left: Fred Perry shirt, £70; right: Next shirt, £25
Printwise, though, I adopt aberrant gingham, like this two-toned Fred Perry. Another au courant address is to about-face up the sleeves like Ralph in Happy Days, but I’m not so abiding about that. Really it’s best aloof to audacious it out and go plain. For £12.50 you can accept a archetypal allotment of polyester-mix American petrol accessory workwear – the Dickies short-sleeved Oxford. Less agleam is the Next linen short-sleeved Oxford, aloft (£25).
As fashion’s abnormal alarm has noted, short-sleeved buttoned-up shirts are so out of appearance that cutting aback them looks abolitionist – appropriately that artist revival. But the best acumen to embrace this unjustly put-against shirt appearance is that they’re adequate – abnormally back you dump the tie.
