"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."
