It's Hip, It's Safe, It's Back

By Michael Walsh

Post-preppies hang them loose over blue jeans. Club-hopping Angelenos sport them with black sweat pants, tennis shoes and a man's oversize blazer, while budding Wall Street aces tuck them under red suspenders. Corporate CEOs never took them off. They're chic; they're hip; they're the very cutting edge of fashion. And they look great with a tan. Please welcome that old standby, and new mainstay, white shirts.

Long derided as a symbol of button-down regimentation fit for only a nerd or an IBM lifer, white shirts are back in style. At Wilkes Bashford, San Francisco's tony clothiers, sales have boomed as executives invest in convenience. "A line of white shirts in the closet is comforting to face when you're in a hurry," observes Salesman Jay Haley. "They go with everything, so you can just pull them out of the closet with no fuss and bam! you're out the door looking good."

Some fashion watchers attribute the resurgence to the influence of Italian designers like Giorgio Armani, whose textured black and gray suits are best highlighted by white shirts. "There is nothing more crisp and effective with a dressy suit than a white shirt," says Phil Borntrager, a buyer at upscale Chicago clothier Mark Shale's. Others see white's return as emblematic of a conservative trend in power dressing. "People are looking for a lower profile, and that includes the way they dress," explains Jody Kuss of the haberdashery Barneys New York.

Whatever the reason, the comeback has been impressive. Between the tie-dyed '60s and the striped-tie mid-'80s, sales of plain-vanilla shirts hovered at around 20% of the dress-shirt market, down from a postwar high of 80%. Now the percentages are moving up again. For the past year and a half, the white shirt has been the best-selling item at Mark Shale's, and at New York City's trendy Bloomingdale's white shirts now comprise 65% of designer solid-color dress shirts, up from 50% two years ago.

Part of the appeal to professionals is conformity. In the cold gray dawn of corporate America's morning after, it seems rude to look rosy in pink, which, along with other solid colors, is sliding out of favor. Says Chicago Accountant Edgar L. King, 68: "We financial types have to present a good, clean look, and I've traditionally relied on the white shirt to complement that look." The white shirt's popularity stretches down the career ladder too. Two years ago Charles McCabe traded in his college jeans and sneakers for something more suited to San Francisco's vested financial district. "I didn't know what I was doing, so I figured white shirts were safe," says McCabe, 26, who works in commercial real estate. "The last thing I wanted to do was make a fashion statement."

But that may be unavoidable, given all the styles currently available. Like cars, white shirts come with an array of customizing options, including button, snap or cutaway Windsor collars, as well as dobby weaves, textured herringbones and jacquards. Among the latest variations are snowy shirts with thin, widely spaced purple or teal stripes. Says Barbara Kirk, a men's-furnishings buyer for the Seattle-based Nordstom stores: "A plain white shirt isn't just a plain white shirt anymore." Nor is it cheap: at Wilkes Bashford, the price can reach $235 for a French-cuff Charvet shirt, made of Sea Island cotton and imported from Paris.

The trend is even being felt in Japan, where the word for a dress shirt of . any color is waishatsu (white shirt). Comme des Garcons, a stylish Japanese clothing firm noted for its somber blacks and grays, is this year featuring waishatsu that for a change really are white.

With reporting by Elizabeth Rudulph/New York and Dennis Wyss/San Francisco