Always Chingona Sometimes Cabrona But Never Pendeja Shirt
We also know that, for centuries, the bulk of a man’s shirt would nearly always be hidden under his outerwear – exceptions being lowly figures such as shepherds in medieval artworks, or bar-room carousers such as Tom Rakewell in Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress, gloriously drunk and surrounded by a flurry of prostitutes.For some analysts, the narrative of the shirt as we know it today really begins in the 1700s, when men grew tired of closing wrist-slits with pieces of string and started insisting on boutons de manchette to fasten the cuffs of their blousy torso-wear. These were initially simple coloured glass buttons but inevitably, embellishment – diamonds, worked gold, miniature painted scenes – before long began appearing on men’s wrists.A year after the first documented use of the word ‘cufflink’, in 1789, came the French Revolution, and Robespierre’s followers deciding to reject the bourgeois finery of Versailles and instead wear courser white linen shirts, often with cravats, prompting the major romantic poets across La Manche – Byron, Keats, Shelley – to enhance their rebel credentials by adopting the guise (which makes students wearing Che Guevara t-shirts in a spirit of faux-revolutionary zeal seem even more woefully undignified than before, does it not?)
Always Chingona Sometimes Cabrona But Never Pendeja Shirt
About here on the shirt’s narrative arc arrives the lead protagonist, George Bryan “Beau” Brummell, who turned the linen, tunic-shaped undershirt and muslin cravat into staple garments for de rigueur men of the time and, in introducing the then expensive notion of laundering linen rather than dousing it with perfume, gave rise to the idea of detachable collars and cuffs – the promontory sections of the garment wearing quicker and requiring more regular washing than the rest – and thus the shirt was suddenly affordable for a far greater portion of male society.It was practicality, too, that led to the shirt’s anatomy being tweaked further and further until, at the end of World War I, the modern shirt – with fixed collar and buttons all along the front – was popularised. All of which leads us to the glorious litany of charming choice that is men’s shirting today. Contemporary men are, to put it mildly, spoilt: Savile, albany or button down collars; squared, rounded, cocktail or mitred cuffs; as many button choices as there are luminous bodies in the cosmos; numerous cotton weights; custom embroidery, contrast stitching or monograms… A modern shirting emporium is, to the informed dandy, an Arcadian fulcrum of abundance: a place where “the agony of choice” is a baffling oxymoron.
