bright-shirt-cogdogblog Summer shirt rules

A strange thing happens when the sun comes out. British men develop a weird virus, it spreads from one to another with more rapidity than a zombie’s bite and it has a terrible effect on them all.

They come out in gaudy shirts.

Neon colours, weird sticky textures, odious patterns that could give an epileptic person a fit, and above all, huge banners with a date and some utterly meaningless event ‘Summer ’97 Auditors’ Bash’ for example, turn up on their fronts and backs.

Why does this happen?

 It’s impossible to be sure.  Perhaps the sun does something strange to their brains or their vision, because these are men who manage to wear perfectly decent, even stylish, clothing for the rest of the year.  Perhaps the heat addles their sense of humour so that they can’t see what a joke they are in their glowing Hawaiian tops.

It’s very much worse in the USA than here, where most men know that exposing lily-white arms (or even worse, legs) is bad enough, but doing so against a colour palate of hot pink, lime green, bright blue and sickly yellow is a total disaster.  In America, for some reason, there’s a sense of pride in hanging chalky-white limbs out on the first warm day, and exposing the winter body to the air swathed only in chino shorts and a shirt like cheap Christmas wrapping paper.

What can be done?

It’s very simple.  Men should understand the rules: 

  • No more than three colours to a single shirt

  • Tropical flowers, canoes against the sunset and lizards on rocks belong on

    Hawaii, not on your back on a Hawaiian shirt

  • White, black, red and blue are good solid colours – when it doubt, pick one and stick to it, polo-shirts look good if they are plain or striped or maybe chequered, but not with monster trucks, hula dancers or cartoon characters imprinted on them (if you can’t name the cartoon character or read the writing, don’t wear it - there are at least a thousand men wandering around in black polo-shirts that bear the legend ’I am an illiterate westerner’ in white kanji script!)

  • Try on your summer shirt with a teenager (either sex) in the room. If they smirk, put it in the bin and go back to the rules.

Summer shirt courtesy of cogdogblog