A Neglected Classic
“I like my shirts like I like my dictionaries, university rejections, and commas: Oxford.” Not a bad gag, that. It’s also as good a précis as any I can think of for the Oxford shirt, a garment born of pretense, drenched in academia, and precious about the details. More than this, though, it’s pretty bloody dull. And that, too, is sort of apt. Because while other staples of the male wardrobe are at least on nodding terms with the color-wheel, the Oxford shirt comes overwhelmingly in just two flavors: blue and white.
Don’t believe me? Go to the fashion e-commerce site, ASOS.com. On second thought, don’t even bother: I’ve done the hard work for you. Out of the 323 collected Oxford shirts on the fashion portal, 265 come in white and blue, by my count. That’s 82%, or, to mix my Oxford metaphors, a bloody strong first. In either case, it’s thoroughly over the top.
Oh, I’m not complaining. Lord knows a cherub-white Oxford and an “I think you’ll find my stepfather paid for the swimming pool here” smile has got me out of a pinch or six in my time. And I’ll be the first to admit that a pastel blue twill does something clever with the eyes. Like glaciers, I’ve been told. Or swimming pools. But to revert always to these two shades belies a momentous period in the Oxford canon. And it’s a period we ought to welcome back immediately, if not sooner.
It’s the early nineties: everyone has lots of cash, Wall Street traders have supremely white teeth, and I’m pretty sure it’s always really, really sunny. In the fashion world, meanwhile, the pillars of Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein are overseeing a quiet renaissance of the Ivy Look. And the must have piece for this height of sartorial renaissance? A multi-coloured Oxford shirt, its blocks split at each seam into the dappled, off-pastel shades of the collegiate twill.
“How much money do you make?” says the plump Donny Azoff in Martin Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street, fifteen seconds into his first appearance and ten seconds after meeting DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort. On Donny’s back is a dusty pink, blue, and turquoise paneled Oxford shirt: when triple-Oscar sporting costumer Sandy Powell wanted to signpost a corner of masculine history, this garment was her neon lighting. “You show me a pay stub with seventy-two thousand dollars on it,” says Jonah Hill’s Azoff, back in Scorsese’s diner, “and I quit my job right now and I work for you”. It’s hard to imagine an outfit better matched to that cavalier pose. Meanwhile, in the glossy sections of his autobiography, a photo dated from 1990 captures Stephen Fry addressing a group of Eton boarders in a blue and yellow striped mixture. “I don’t remember the occasion” reads the caption, “But I do remember that Paul Smith shirt.” And when advertising guru Rory Sutherland pulls on a multi panel Oxford for a TED talk about the importance of the details, the point begins to make itself.
It’s also hard to imagine the Oxford shirt without some necessary experimentation or a shade or two of knowing imposture. From the Scottish basket weavers who annexed the names for their new twills from several seats of learning (Yale, Harvard and Cambridge never quite made it, clearly), to John Brooks of, well, Brooks Brothers, who lifted the button-down collar and casual crumple off the back of a polo player, the Oxford shirt has had a precocious, presumptuous youth. Any menswear purist who tells you the multi panel Oxford corrupts the garment simply doesn’t know his eggs, or at the very least could do with spicing them up.
Some in the know design houses, have made more than a sly nod towards the multi panel Oxford in recent seasons. Ralph Lauren, aware to the last of the spirit of the thing, still produces a handful of ‘Fun’ shirts each summer to pass around various department stores, while this year Brooks Brothers employed the same moniker for a gorgeous linen and pastel jumble. GANT, meanwhile, went all out —down to the collar stands, plackets and cuffs—on a quadruple-colored effort as summer turned to autumn.
But just as Ralph took the original ivied mantle from Brooks Brothers, so too must a new raft of designers keep this little game afoot. Chocky Hendreth—an English brand named, wonderfully, after an imaginary friend—make both tiny collections of handmade Oxfords and a pretty good bid for the crown. Their ‘Brosier’ shirt is a faded blue mix that looks like an afternoon pool party, while another model makes a good go of things in the requisite range of pastels.
I hope that there’ll soon be others joining them at the vanguard. Michael Bastian, GANT bigwig and Bergdorf honcho, tells us to “Always have a pink Oxford shirt ready for days when you’re feeling run down.” The multi-panel Oxford is this pick-me-up writ large. Why feel simply ‘in the pink’ when you can feel in the pink, blue, yellow and green?
