History of Men's Shirts

A brief background of shirts for men

Simply put, a shirt is a garment made of woven cloth worn on the upper body. The oldest shirt that still exists today is from Egypt of about 3000 BC, a linen garment found in a tomb of an Egyptian ruler of the First Dynasty. Fine pleats in the sleeves and shoulders give this ancient shirt a form-fitting style of which any tailor today would be proud. The definition of a shirt today, however, must include cuffs at the ends of the sleeves, a collar and a full-length frontal vertical slit lined with buttons and buttonholes. Usually, such a shirt is worn with a necktie tucked under the collar and knotted at the throat; a jacket is worn covering most of the shirt, exposing only the area around the tie and at the sleeve's cuffs.

Our Choice: Men's Formal Shirts

Below are just a few of the finest examples of quality formal shirts for men.

The Shirt Through the Ages

Up until the twentieth century, a man's shirt was considered an undergarment and not a piece of clothing to be displayed when worn. During the Middle Ages, a man's shirt was a plain garment worn against the skin and underneath other concealing clothes. Paintings from that time show that only those at the bottom of the social order, such as prisoners, wore shirts that could be seen. It wasn't until the 1600s that fashionable European men wore their shirts in such a way as to reveal the undergarment, most often in an erotic sense. In the 1700s, shirts were still concealed and woven with long tails to serve as underwear. Fully showing a shirt was still considered indecent up until the end of the 1800s.

Cotton and wool, simply woven, were the most common textiles originally used for shirts. The weaving of the fabric used to make a shirt has also evolved over the centuries. Today, there are four types of complex weaving used for shirts:

• Plain, broken down into broadcloth with warp threads double the number of weft threads and poplin with heavier warp threads
• Twill, which has a diagonal weave of warp and weft
• Oxford, where warp and weft crisscross, giving a lustrous appearance
• Satin, where multiple warps cover each weft

Other parts of the shirt gained some embellishment over the centuries. Small pieces of lacework and frill appeared at the neck and on cuffs starting around the 1500s. Extraordinarily large neck frills, called jabots, became fashionable in Europe in the 1600s. From the Renaissance onward, embroidery was occasionally added to the front panels of shirts and more of the front of a shirt was designed to be shown.

Colours other than white began to be used for shirts in the early 1800s, but such colours were considered unfashionable and intended only for the working classes. Wearing a shirt in 19th century Europe that was not a shade of white was an indicator that the wearer was not a gentleman. It wasn't until the end of the Edwardian era at the start of the twentieth century that colour and pattern became acceptable fashion for shirts. Blue of various shades became popular for men's shirts around 1920, though other colours, such as yellow, pink and lavender, did not become acceptable until after the middle of the twentieth century. Patterns on shirts, such as thin stripes, also became acceptable.

Variations on the men's shirt were developed for the most formal occasions over the last hundred or so years and resulted in such styles as dress-day, dress-evening, black-tie and white-tie shirts, some types of which must be assembled to be worn rather than donned. The first use of the term "button down" was often mistakenly taken to mean the buttons that line the front of a shirt; instead, "button-down" refers to the collars whose tabs button to the body of the shirt, as introduced in 1896 by Brooks Brothers in America. Since then, however, "button-down" style has become more an adjective describing a no-nonsense attitude rather than an element of fashion.

Toward the turn of the millennium, wearing a shirt without a jacket or tie became acceptable, though not for formal occasions. Men's shirts today are the standard for the workplace, but in no particular style. Still, shirts are most often worn with a tie around the collar and a jacket.