Guys,
There are many reasons for buying a good quality, long lasting cool looking shirt.
Let’s see first how it ties into everything on our top values list: Money, Power, Women.
I mean… these are your top 3 priorities, right?
In this order:
- Money,
- Power,
- Women.
Although they are in reverse order of importance when it comes to our basic instincts, they all ultimately feed the basic survival instincts:
- Money brings power. Don’t even get started with: "You can have power without money" (do you know anybody that does not have money, but has power? Or anybody that has money but not power?) or "Power brings money" (Rarely! The quickest way to power is through money – just browse the Forbes lists.). Money also brings food, drink and everything else we need to survive.
- Money attract women, but even more –
POWER
attracts Women (And the best ones. Even the ones that claim that they are not looking for someone powerful, they will melt when they'll eventually meet a powerful man).
So MONEY brings POWER and POWER brings WOMEN. It is our primal instinct to attract the best women that can ensure our genes’ survival (even if it sounds uncool or harsh, it is no different from the need to eat, the need for air, food, water, etc. – check out Maslow’s hierarchy of needs).
Now, you may wonder what that has to do with a shirt…
Money: A good shirt makes you look like a million bucks. It brings you a little respect and presence. It implies that you have the smart taste and the money to invest in a good shirt. That's right, to INVEST in a shirt. It has been proven that the better you dress at work the more likely it is to get more respect from your piers and your bosses and be promoted. It implies that you know how to manage your money, that you have respect for the workplace and for your co-workers and that you pay attention to details and respect yourself (nobody can respect someone that doesn't respect himself).
Power: Confidence is the backbone of power. Nobody that lacks confidence can be entrusted with any powers. Looking good enhances that confidence. It enhances your presence and commands attention. Did you ever see a very powerful person being poorly dressed? And did you ever see someone well dressed being utterly disrespected?
Women: There is an "…universal appeal of a woman dressed in nothing but a man's shirt".
"The shirt itself: It has to have belonged to a specific man to give it its innuendo; a random chaste shirt still fresh from its packaging won't do. The shirt in question can be ink-stained, crisply pressed, or cause for contention with the dry cleaners. It can be gently fraying around the edges with buttons missing. It can be from the Gap, Christian Dior, Savile Row, or stolen from a best friend. But it must have basic archaeological bones to it: You need to have worn and loved it to pass it on."
However, in order for man's a shirt to be put on by a woman, it has to be clean, soft, good looking and in decent shape. No woman will ever wear your sweaty shirt, stained with motor oil or ripped off. It also has to be soft to be worn directly on her skin. No cheap shirt can ever last long enough for a man to "love it". No cheap shirt can be soft enough for a woman's bare skin. And no cheap shirt will look "nice" enough for a woman to put on.
So guys, next time you are shopping for a shirt, INVEST in a good one, it will pay you back in many ways.
I will let you savor the article written by British model and author Sophie Dahl. The article is is featured on Men's Vogue:
Shirt Tales
Forget couture, bikinis, and even lingerie. A lady looks her best when wearing her man's finest button-down. By Sophie Dahl
Sophie Dahl contemplates the serious bonding that
occurs when she dresses like a gentleman. (Photo: Phil Poynter)"What a man enjoys about a woman's clothes are his fantasies of how she would look without them." So wrote the eternally caustic Evelyn Waugh, and although this statement is negotiable (particularly to men with a fondness for couture), what Waugh failed to add is the universal appeal of a woman dressed in nothing but a man's shirt.
The shirt itself: It has to have belonged to a specific man to give it its innuendo; a random chaste shirt still fresh from its packaging won't do. The shirt in question can be ink-stained, crisply pressed, or cause for contention with the dry cleaners. It can be gently fraying around the edges with buttons missing. It can be from the Gap, Christian Dior, Savile Row, or stolen from a best friend. But it must have basic archaeological bones to it: You need to have worn and loved it to pass it on.
There is an easy innocence to a girl in a guy's shirt, laced with a heavy dose of connotation; she's definitely not at her house, with access to her wardrobe. Her evening dress has been thrown carelessly over her lover's bedroom chair the night before—and an evening dress doesn't conjure the same allure at breakfast on a bright Saturday morning. We can't imagine the same goddess in a robe; a robe is without potency. A man's T-shirt is a Sunday night sort of thing when a courtship is somewhat cemented. No, breakfast of the novice lovers (or familiars pretending to be novices) is where a real shirt—with buttons and a collar—is called for, a fond shirt to kiss the top of the thigh, with the sleeves rolled up around soft, braceleted arms. Who would have denied Jean Shrimpton or Sophia Loren her shirt after a long night? Not many, and so the famous images of both, clad thus.
The shirt girl is the antithesis of the sweater girl, who is all tease, impenetrable lipstick and the smug summary of much adolescent angst. The shirt girl is simply undone. Her hair has betrayed her, with its telltale tangles; she might have mascara smudged sleepily under her eyes; and she likes croissants and crossword puzzles for breakfast. She sometimes likes to go back to bed in the afternoons. She likes strong coffee, and she likes to laugh. She smells good, old-fashioned.
She has an impressive lineage, too, including the erudite, saucy Colette; Garbo, with her mystery and complication; and Katharine Hepburn's pale, clipped passion, golf shoes, and fast driving. One of the best shirt girls gone awry was Geena Davis as Thelma Dickinson, irrefutable in Brad Pitt's lazy hustler denim. She made his shirt her own, with a knot at the waist, a landscape of bronzed liberated flesh showing, and made it even better with that big grin and goofy laugh. That shimmering paragon of beauty in fiction, The Great Gatsby's Daisy Buchanan, had a thing about shirts too. In the sanctum of Jay Gatsby's Long Island closet, surrounded by his linens, silks, and monogrammed blues, she weeps for what has been: "It makes me sad because I've never seen such—such beautiful shirts before."
In a woman's closet you will find stories between the hangers. There hangs the quietly slinky dress employed for dancing and seduction, shoes that mean no nonsense coupled with the ones that do, the pale tweed suit that she felt fraudulent in when she met the parents, sweatpants whose only outing is to the deli of a Sunday morning. There will be T-shirts she cannot bear to part with, sweaters borrowed from and never returned to her sisters, maybe a wedding dress cloaked in synthetic armor to keep the moths and time away. There will also probably be a man's shirt or two hanging quietly there.
I recently emptied my closet in the apartment I shared with my boyfriend. It was a horrible, close day in early June, the sky calling a storm. As I packed I realized that, one day, someone else would likely hang her clothes there, a woman who would perhaps know that, along with being crazy, I was tidy. Will she imagine what went before her? Or will the vacuum cleaner and polish have soothed every ghost of me away?
I wanted to take his shirts, the ones with his initials that I wore when I was away on trips, and sometimes in bed, which branded me his and made me feel like I was in the sixth grade writing boys' initials in pen up my arms. I wanted to take those shirts but couldn't, because I had given up the right to them. Clothes and walls: They're such secret-keepers, guarding the flame of the everyday, from the mundane to the life-altering. Our basics—bricks and mortar, cotton and wool—are the stolid witnesses to love and all that's in between. How we forget. I took the shirts back to his closet and hung them up, and I stood in there, where it was still like a church away from all the moving men, rain, and boxes. I buried my face in those shirts, as many as I could fit my arms around, and perhaps for the last time, I breathed him in. — SOPHIE DAHL
