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Even if your closet is ninety percent fleece, the best men's dress shirts are non-negotiables. At some point, you’ll face an occasion that requires one—a laid-back wedding, a high-stakes job interview, a weirdly formal middle-school piano recital. But the right dress shirt won’t just save you in a pinch or help you sneak past upper management at your new corporate gig. (Especially if said corporate gig is working at GQ.) Because the superlative versions of the style aren’t simply dress shirts—or, at least, not exclusively dress shirts.
Buy one equipped with the right fit, details, and fabrics, and even the most formal of the bunch can kick it in less stuffy environments without eliciting snickers. We’re on-the-record fans of throwing one on with a groovy tie and crisp trousers, but toss a dress shirt over a graphic tee and baggy shorts, and suddenly, your otherwise schlubby fit looks exponentially more considered—and exponentially more stylish. For starters, polos aren’t dress shirts just because they have a collar.
We know, we know—finding the line between casual shirts and formal shirts is hard. Then there’s fabric, little details like cuffs, plackets, and color. And on top of all that, “the perfect fit” is so subjective.
We’ve done the dirty work, buttoned more buttons than we thought was possible, aggregated a heap of our favorites, and wore ‘em every which way possible to determine, once and for all, the absolute best dress shirts for men. We’ve wholeheartedly recommended J.Crew’s Bowery dress shirts for a long time. But it was up until just recently that the revered preppy label quietly released a new button-up that we had to do some internal reckoning.
The Slim Portuguese cotton Oxford dress shirt doesn’t enjoy the distinction of being named after a New York City street (e.g. the Ludlow suit, or the 770 jeans). But don’t let the straight-forward, flavorless nomenclature fool you. Let’s start with the obvious: the fabric.
It’s an all-cotton Oxford cloth woven exclusively for J.Crew by the respected Portuguese mill, Solemos. It’s smooth and luxurious with an elegant drape. Plus, the thicker yarns of an Oxford cloth makes it versatile enough for less formal occasions when you want to wear it with a pair of jeans, untucked, even.
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