The 'go anywhere' dress that flatters every age
On the way to the doctor’s on Thursday, I spotted 15 shirt dresses. One of them was on the doctor. Sixteen - if you count the one I was wearing.
There’s a reason the shirt dress has triumphed this summer (rejoice all ye who fell into a slough of despond over last year’s shapeless sacks). It has contouring aplenty without shoving it in your face. So elastic is the shirt dress concept that it can have as much or as little shape as you choose. It can be wasp-waisted with a wooshy prom skirt. Or it can be slim and languid. It can have enough loud patterns to get arrested for noise pollution. Or be as minimalist as a monk. It comes in taffeta, silk, cotton and viscose, with or without sleeves. There’s probably one somewhere out there made of sackcloth. And it probably looks great. That’s the genius of a shirt dress. You can wear one with kitten heels, a hair band and do the full Mrs Maisel. You can flit around in a long, unadorned one worn teamed with flatforms or mules and pretend you’re wearing The Row. Or pop it over hot pants and a bralet as if you’re in a remake of Klute.
Whatever length they are, they work, which means a teen can wear a microscopic one without fear of looking too prim. But they’re also wonderful on 80-year-olds. The key is that it indents at the waist and has buttons, a zip or ties that run most of its length. And pockets. For me, no pockets, no deal.
Cotton shirt dress, £470, J'Amemme; Geometric print dress, £149, Massimo Dutti; Cotton poplin dress, £590, Max Mara; Silk dress, £349, Ralph Lauren
It’s also worth going through your belt collection, as many inexpensive shirt dresses come with flimsy, fabric ones and look so much better once you’ve swapped that out for a good leather one.
After a dearth of anything that seemed remotely flattering in the dress department, we now have an embarrassment of shirt-dresses. Everyone from Dancing Leopard (that’s the maxi shirt dress the doctor was wearing) to Alexander McQueen. In fact Dancing Leopard has several, including maxis, at the bargain price of around £57. McQueen’s are not £57. They’re not even £57 with a zero on the end. But they have almost as much construction in them as St Paul’s Cathedral – stiffness, but also lightness (not easy to achieve), balloon sleeves, a shirred, corseted waist that doesn’t look corseted (not easy either). This is simplicity in its most refined, complex incarnation. The woman I saw wearing a navy McQueen shirt dress this week (that was number 12) had partnered it with chunky lace up boots and even on a warm sunny day, took the prize for most stylish outfit of the week.
If you’re got the courage, this cream pleated one from J’amemme, hand crafted from cotton in their tiny studio and also available in mauve or pale blue, and worn over hot pants, is another option.
See how the shirt dress, first launched in 1942 by by Claire McCardell, one of the founders of modern USA fashion, keeps reinventing itself?
Cotton dress, £150, Me + Em; Ruby Rocks dress, £49, SilkFred; Silk dress, £325, LK Bennett; Viscose crepe dress, £620, Jane Atelier; Jacquard dress, £340, Cefinn
Back then it was called the Pop-over dress and was designed to do just that – slip over the diligent housewife’s outfit of the day, and protect it while she went about her dusting. It sold in its thousands. McCardell, an early adopter of functional, simplified fashion, fell in love with its workwear sensibility and thereafter included some kind of wrap-around or button-through dress in all her collections. Norman Norell, another grandee of American fashion, observed that McCardell could take five dollars of “common calico cotton” and make a smart dress women could wear anywhere. That, it seems to me, is the essence of intelligent democratic fashion: not simplistic cuts made from dross, but a design with integrity that works in honest, inexpensive fabrics as well as it does in silk satin.
This summer, shirt dresses come at all prices. You can find ones under £100 that do the job very well. Somerset by Alice Temperley is a pretty skimmer – not so much cinching the waist, as gently hinting at it, while drawing attention to the wrists with its fluted sleeves. It’s washable too. Mango’s lilac linen version looks lovely worn on its own, belted, or over a pair of trousers. Versatility is built into the shirt-dress’s mission.
Meanwhile Zara’s fuchsia wrap shirt dress is all about that hit of colour. Shirt dresses look as good in one plain pop as they do in monochrome or pattern. Literally just what the doctor ordered.
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