Is the return of the white shirt a harbinger of a seismic shift in our culture? An arrowhead to a future when the average age of the population is 97? Or is it simply the perfect garnish for 2006’s skinny, vaguely New Wavish-looking trousers, tulip-shaped skirts and pinafore dresses? Either way, it’s only fair to warn you that boring, conformist and frankly quite dull things are having a bit of a fashion moment. Navy-blue school uniform-style skirts and V-necks; black and white; trench coats – these are all huge this spring. And they’re fashion trends that even very, very sensible people who don’t do fashion can endorse.
The Sex and the City frivolity that gripped the land for several years in the early millennium – convincing otherwise sane women that it was perfectly OK to live their life wearing something shamelessly attention-seeking and potentially bankrupting – has passed. We now know what we always knew – that in fashion as in life, while beauty is an ideal starting point, function is quite a bonus, too. The sine qua non of usefulness has to be the white shirt. The last time it was big was the early Nineties, in the depths of a major recession. US Vogue put a bunch of white shirt-wearing glamazons on its cover and a Moment was born – or at least the supermodel was.
This time we’ll wear white shirts not as a protest against Eighties excess, but against boho excess. Fashion’s about to get cleaner, more pared-down, and a lot more androgynous after years of pharmaceutical-strength femininity. The white shirt, with its crisp, no-nonsense, understated air of efficiency is the perfect summation of this. Call me fetishistic, but I relish a trend that validates one’s inner fussiness (also known as having an acute eye or being a connoisseur). Trying on 15 white shirts and discarding them one by one because they’re too boxy, too short, too fussy, too unimaginative, not very nice cotton or the wrong kind of white has a self-abnegating purity about it that’s probably as close as most of us will get to a state of Zen. A trend this minimal means that, unlike boho, which disguised its own flaws by piling on more and more until the onlooker was stunned into acceptance, there’s nowhere for mistakes and dodgy sweatshop workmanship to hide in a white shirt. That’s no bad thing – it may serve as a reminder of a time when clothes were not as cheap as chips and therefore required significant scrutiny before purchase.
You may even find some miraculous white on the high street this summer. Then again you may discover that to achieve the full 18th-century splendour of Balenciaga’s elaborate lace ruffled white shirts, you have to buy Balenciaga, or that to come close to minimalist perfection, it’s necessary to shell out for Margaret Howell, or that to revel in beautifully designed, organically grown cotton, you’re just going to have to pay for a shirt by the new label Noir (find it in Harvey Nichols). Will your conscience permit you to spend £205 on a Margaret Howell (and much, much more for Balenciaga)? Or is your limit £20? Don’t you love it when a trip to Gap turns into a voyage of self-discovery?