Dress shirts are a quintessential part of any man’s wardrobe, regardless of if you have no suit in your wardrobe or you have more than a few. A good dress shirt can be worn on various occasions, and we are all familiar with dress shirts in business settings. But you can also wear a dress shirt on a date with a casual pair of jeans, for instance, and you can wear your favourite dress shirt with a sport coat on a summer outing. Dress shirts are essential, for sure, but if you are looking to wear your dress shirt with your own bespoke or custom-made suit, what colours should you choose? The following are some tips on ideal dress shirt colours for your suit: how to pick one for every purpose or occasion.
Think about its role
One of the best ways you can determine the colour of the dress shirt you can wear for the day or an event is to think about its role. Simply put, what will you be wearing the shirt for – is it for a bachelor or stag party, for example, or is it for a meeting with business partners or clients? Will you be wearing the dress shirt for pleasure or business? If you are pairing a dress shirt with your suit from your bespoke tailor for pleasure, then it’s a social occasion – which basically means that you can choose any colour you fancy. It’s more about choosing the colours you prefer as well as making sure that they suit your complexion and the other elements or accessories you would like to wear.
A shirt for a business setting?
If you are thinking of a dress shirt for a business setting, white will always remain a top choice. This is particularly true if you work in a more formal business environment where suits and ties are a standard every day. If you want to deviate from the norm, you can always go for a white patterned dress shirt, or you can opt for another colour as long as it is also very light, such as a pale pastel blue.
If your business setting falls in the middle, meaning you work at a place where it’s normal for people to wear collared shirts every day, but ties and jackets aren’t a standard, avoid solid or deep colours for your dress shirts and just experiment with lighter colours or patterns that blend different colours.
Determine how versatile you want it to be
White shirts can be worn virtually anywhere – they are, quite literally, a blank canvas or slate. But when you begin getting into different colours, you are showcasing more of your personal style and making a statement. So before you try and individualise yourself completely with your dress shirt colour, think about how versatile you would like it to be. Dress shirts that are deeper and richer and brighter in colour tend to be less versatile or flexible; for instance, a beautiful and shiny dark emerald green shirt may be beautiful, but you can only wear it with certain jackets and only when you are aiming to be more flamboyant.
If you want to look serious, stick to traditional dress shirts such as light blue and white, but if you want to look more dandified, think of bolder colours and patterns such as pinks, purples, greens, and reds.
Image attributed to Pixabay.com
