LITTLE ROCK — Q. Recently, a young man asked me what I thought of the combination he was wearing: a tweed sports jacket, blue patterned tie and white shirt. I was able to reassure him that the combination looked fine, but I could not bring myself to point out to him the one huge problem with his look.
A. The issue was his white shirt - a problem that most men are totally unaware of. It was not that the shirt was wrong, but that it did not look pristine white.
Colored shirts are either the right shade or not and they usually look fresh. But white is another story. As it ages, it may lose its crisp, fresh appearance. One thing I have learned over the years is that men have problems throwing out something that is neither worn out nor much too small.If it is in good repair and still fits, but has lost its original fastidious look, it becomes a liability in a man’s closet.
This happens to white shirts for one of three reasons.
Often a shirt that is a cotton/polyester blend will lose its pure white color after repeated laundering. Synthetics do not take well to bleach, and whites can become off-white. They cannot be restored.
Even all-cotton white shirts may lose their brightwhite color in home laundering because the person washing them is afraid to use liquid chlorine bleach. True, too much bleach can shorten a garment’s life, but what use is a long-lasting white shirt that no longer looks sparkling clean? Rather than using too much bleach, the most common mistake is not using any.
The surest route to snowwhite shirts is taking them to the very best professional dry cleaner/laundry you can find. Bargain-basement laundries cut corners. They have to or they could not charge low prices.
The finest professional cleaners use expensive oxygen (rather than chlorine) bleaches. They wash and bleach each shirt more than once. They rinse thoroughly, and they produce extremely white shirts.
I can still vividly recall several years ago seeing a magnificently turned-out man in an airport in Milan (the city which I believe produces the world’s best-dressed men). As we awaited the plane’s arrival, his clothes caught my eye. I felt certain he would take a seat in first class, and he did not disappoint me. I was taken not so much with his well-tailored black-and-white tweed jacket, dark gray trousers, and black knit tie, but with his white shirt that fairly gleamed.(Of course, his good looks and flattering tan didn’t hurt, but I swear it was the whiteness of his shirt that mesmerized me.) That one element of his attire clearly projected his interest in dressing well. His shirt was probably expensive, but from a distance I could only see that it was intensely white and set off everything else he was wearing to very great advantage.
If your white shirts have grown less-than-perfect looking, consider changing your washing method or your professional laundry. Ask around. A friend might know a topnotch cleaner. But if the best place you find cannot get your shirts really white again, weed them out of your closet and give them away to your favorite charity. It may be a small point, but it is one well worth paying attention to.
For this same reason I often suggest a man update his black-tie attire, not by buying an expensive new tuxedo, but merely by investing in a new all-cotton formal shirt, one that is beautifully white.
INAUGURAL BOAST
Incidentally, for those of you who have read my advice about not deviating when dressing in white-tie and black-tie attire, and who noticed that President Barack Obama wore a white bow tie (rather than the traditional black one) with his formal white shirt and tuxedo at the inaugural balls, I should repeat what I have said in the past: If you have the style to knowingly pull off “a mistake,” and especially if you are “the boss,” you can occasionally deviate from the rules.
As we all noticed, he looked almost as good as Michelle.
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High Profile, Pages 41 on 01/27/2013