Writer and editor Louis Cheslaw might have said it best. “You rarely hear about an iconic new shirt,” he told me. “Where’s the hype T-shirt?”
From knitwear to pants, dresses to skirts, most clothing categories feel like a question already answered. If there’s a gap in my closet, I typically have at least some idea of how to fill it — by buying more of a certain silhouette, say, or a broader color selection. There are no shortage of quality basics in these categories, or even more whimsical or daring designs. They’re easy to find and easy to be delighted by.
But when it comes to the hunt for a top that I love — one that’s surprising and creative, yet wearable and well-made — I get lost. It’s the one question my closet has posed to me again and again that I still can’t easily answer with an online browse or a dedicated shopping trip. For a while, I thought it was my fault; maybe I wasn’t looking hard enough. But every time I typed “short-sleeved shirt” into my search bar, the results left me feeling trapped in a funhouse full of mirrors reflecting the same uninspiring styles.
I first heard someone put my quandary into words about a year ago, when an email from Heather Hurst’s PIGPEN hit my inbox. The subject line read: “the top recession.” “My comment section and DMs are frequently punctuated by cries for help from the dead zone between clean-girl-quiet-luxury-minimalism and wacky statement dressing,” she wrote. Feeling a little like a gaslit girlfriend who’d finally gone to therapy, I called Hurst up to ask about this very topic.
“It’s not that good tops don’t exist,” she says. “They’re just really hard to find.” She attributes this in part to the “top ouroboros,” wherein every brand is “seemingly making the same thing — the thing that people want,” yet “nobody can find anything that they want.”
How did we arrive here? For starters, it helps to know that fashion literally doesn’t approach shirts the same way it does other items of clothing. As trend strategist Anu Lingala points out, women didn’t start wearing separates until more recently in history, and most of those separates were borrowed from menswear: the T-shirt, the button-up, the polo.
From a designer’s perspective, it’s also just more difficult to make a shirt. The torso presents more measurements to account for than other garments: bust, hips, waist, torso length. Arms are relatively standard, but the other, more finicky elements of the shirt make it a difficult place to innovate. “It is a small amount of space with a lot going on,” Lingala says. The challenge in creating a style that will appeal to and, more importantly, fit a diversity of buyers often deters designers and retailers from investing time, effort, and money into the endeavor. Hence the micro-iterations on vest tops and simple white tees — mass-manufacturable styles seen as worth tinkering with.
Where’s the hype T-shirt?
It’s no wonder designers favor innovation in other categories. “When we would be thinking about couture for a show, I would think, ‘If it’s going to be this really maximal piece, we should make it a dress.’ You can throw all your resources and time into that,” says Olivia Cheng, founder of New York clothing brand and vintage store Dauphinette. “It’s the easiest answer because it almost feels like it accomplishes more.”
Plus, brands and retailers gather their own data on things such as consumer behavior and buying habits. That data in turn informs what brands acquire or make. “More and more companies see data as their entire buy assortments,” Lingala says. “It becomes a cycle of data-based confirmation.” This habit accelerates as more data becomes available compared to 10 or 20 years ago. It’s basic supply and demand: If we as consumers demonstrate less interest in tops compared to other pieces, companies interpret that as a decreased demand for tops and deprioritize them in their stock.
The way Noah Zagor — stylist, consultant, and professor who previously worked at trend forecasting company WGSN — explains it, trends forecasting isn’t an exact science so much as a scientific method. In the case of shirts, the compounding factors of more companies implementing return-to-office, a growing reliance on easy-to-style pieces, and a literal economic recession could all inform a lack of innovation. “We have this uncertain, nerve-wracking moment,” Zagor says. “You’re hedging your bets a little. You don’t know what the future is so you need to invest in more stable product.” That remains true for both the buyers and the retailers.
If it’s going to be this really maximal piece, we should make it a dress.
Zagor points out that our shirt malady might be less the result of a dearth of tops and more a tendency toward subdued styles featuring small flairs of detail: the colored stitching and exposed threads that designer Camiel Fortgens is known for, for example, or a bold pattern, a statement button, or hardware in an unexpected place. This is especially true for menswear. “A big print and intense color is not well-received,” Cheslaw says. But “something about using hardware as decoration comes across as more utilitarian and rugged. There’s a big openness to a little detail here and there, but not to something you’d see from 20 feet away.” Plus, the burgeoning gender-neutral clothing market invites new ways to look at and design basics.
Still, as I spoke to more people, one question crystallized in my mind: how did the top, the article of clothing that sits front and center on the body and is thereby most noticeable, become an afterthought? It’s already more “in the spotlight” than, say, a pair of interesting shoes poking out from funky jeans. So why don’t we shop for our shirts the same way we shop for shoes or pants?
Perhaps the answer has to do with a deeper question: What makes a top good in the first place? As near as I can tell, the answer is either: it’s cool and novel, or it’s unassuming enough to blend in with any outfit. Rarely can one shirt do both. “There seems to be an impulse towards that base layer being a simple non-negotiable as opposed to a fun place to adventure,” Cheslaw says.
A top that announces itself too loudly — with a logo, a dramatic print, or a stand-out embellishment — depreciates in wearability. As Cheng points out, it requires thought about what you can wear it with, and how often. On the other hand, a workhorse top has to be a little bit bland for the sake of versatility, and to pass the “Didn’t you just wear that yesterday?” check. No wonder plain T-shirts have dominated the top discourse for years. They’re beige paint in top form.
A truly great top requires an adept hand with styling — one that knows how to balance a flashy logo with more down-to-earth jeans and sneaks, or how to make a silky blouse work for multiple looks. In an age when many people rely on a TikTok algorithm to feed them exactly what they want, exactly how they want it, that doesn’t always come easy.
Whoever you are, wherever you’re going, the top is your sartorial handshake — the thing that introduces you while also doing a decent job of covering your variously shaped torso in the way that you prefer. It makes sense that the top shortage isn’t just the fault of the fashion industry playing it safe. A good top might be hard to find, but a perfectly fine one is all too easy to come by.
