I had an argument with myself about denim shirts that lasted the better part of October, and it got resolved not by either side backing down but by Denver dropping to nineteen degrees overnight and making the whole debate irrelevant. One half of me maintained that a denim shirt is the single most useful layering piece a person can own, thin enough to disappear under a coat, structured enough to hold its own over a tee. The other half kept bringing up the actual physical experience of wearing one on the train, which is a specific kind of misery I first discovered around 2004 and apparently never fully processed. Then it got cold enough that the shirt went under a coat and stayed there, and the argument just ended. Weather doesn’t care who was right.
Here’s the case for it.
A denim shirt does something a flannel or a chambray can’t quite manage, it reads as a piece of clothing rather than pajama separates, and it sits close enough to the body that you can put a sweater over it without looking like you’re wearing two coats. I’ve had a version of this hanging in my closet in some form since the Clinton administration, and the good ones age like the right kind of jeans, going soft at the collar and pale along the fold lines in a way that looks earned rather than accidental.
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Here’s the case against it, and it’s the case my body makes every single time. Layer it under a coat on a train that’s running warm, which every train in America apparently is, and the collar starts working against your neck within about eleven minutes, I’ve timed this, it’s genuinely eleven minutes. The back and shoulders are where the fit either works or doesn’t, if it’s cut generously through there it bunches under a coat like a paper bag, and if it’s cut close it rides up the second you reach for a subway pole. There is not a lot of room in between, and I’ve owned exactly one that found it.
I’d like to have a word with the woman who bought a slim fit version in 1996 thinking it would layer like a second skin. It rode up to her ribs by lunch every single day for a year before she admitted defeat.
The washing matters more than people think, denim that’s gone through a proper number of cycles softens at the cuffs and collar in a way that stops the chafing almost entirely, which means the version worth keeping is never the crisp one straight off the rack, it’s the one that’s already a little defeated.
This one’s a gamble on anyone who runs warm or moves around a lot during the day, it rewards patience and punishes people in a hurry, and I’d rather say that outright than pretend it suits everybody equally.
