Jim Moore, GQ’s creative director at large, said he had recently noticed point-collar dress shirts coming back into fashion, a style he had not seen much since its surge in popularity in the mid-1990s. He echoed Mr. Paget’s observations about how attitudes toward dress shirts were evolving.
“I think the dress shirt is important again, but it’s not the same as it was,” Mr. Moore said. “Now, I don’t think you need a ton of dress shirts, you need basic ones, but the right ones — the right color blue, a few beautiful ones in white, a long point collar, a spread collar and a button-down collar.”
While the quintessential dress shirt — the kind often made of cotton in a poplin or twill weave — is by no means extinct, its halcyon days may be behind us, said Sean Estok, who oversees men’s tailored clothing and shoes at Macy’s department stores.
“Customers aren’t buying four dress shirts at the same time anymore, they’re refreshing one or two,” Mr. Estok said. “They don’t need a closet to have 50 different dress shirts like they once did, because office life is not the same.”
The dress shirt’s reign as a white-collar wardrobe staple was once underscored by the garment’s many permutations: Versions designed to be worn with their shirttails hanging out, for example, or the no-iron shirts introduced in the late 1970s, which were treated with a chemical process meant to prevent wrinkling. (Many brands — Ralph Lauren, J. Crew, Brooks Brothers, Proper Cloth — still offer versions.)
Mr. Moore of GQ recalled the popularity of no-iron shirts exploding in the 1980s, the decade when he began working at the publication. Mr. Moore, who is also a stylist and consultant for men’s wear brands including Todd Snyder, Hugo Boss and Canali, described the ’80s as a golden age for dress shirts that was heavily influenced by the wardrobes of financial types associated with that time.
