Frump School Lesson: The Big Shirt
Just try to perceive my body in this shirt
Menswear in women’s fashion has a long and deliciously subversive history. We adore Katharine Hepburn and Marlene Dietrich in suits and sharp white shirts, slacks, tailored jackets, and ties. The message is frump-adjacent: I don’t need to dress the way you expect me to in order to accomplish things in this world. I will dress in a practical fashion and get shit done.
Marlene’s look from the 1930s is crisp, tailored, sharp, conveying a sense of masculine power. Hepburn’s look from 1952 is much more relaxed, the jacket allowing for a casual freedom of movement, uninterested in providing clues about the shape beneath it.
The Big Shirt is a little different, particularly the Big Shirt not tucked in. It embodies this funny dichotomy: did I borrow my date’s shirt to make coffee the morning after, pulled from a jumble of yesterday’s clothes on the floor, or am I wearing a secondhand Big Shirt in which to paint my masterpiece or plant my garden? It’s both sexy1 and unsexy depending on context: the first suggests a degree of intimacy and even possession, the second suggests independence, autonomy, creativity.
Editorially, we first start to see the Big Shirt show up in the mid-1970s and it is definitely the traditionally sexy variety:
In May 1978, Vogue assures us that the big shirt is sexy! and you can still see “the body underneath” and it really just drives home how entrenched this idea is, that women can and should always be striving for sexy when dressing, even if they are trying to be comfortable:
I do love the stripes and the skinny tie though.
The 1980s and early 90s was prime time for The Big Shirt, and this is what I remember from childhood, being able to wear leggings and these big shirts to hide my midsection.
With the few exceptions we see aimed at younger women in Seventeen, these editorial images almost always showed big shirts unbuttoned at the bottom, as though they just couldn’t bear to cover the bodies of their thin models.
I love this blue linen shirt though, the way the pleats fall from the shoulders.
Anyway, this week we are dressing with The Big Shirt. First day I was shooting in studio, so you get an end of day, unstyled and wrinkled office bathroom mirror selfie because I hadn’t yet discovered I could shoot my own outfits in the studio:
The shirt is hemp so it looks wrinkled even when it’s not the end of the day but I love it, it’s from Mara Hoffman and I wish her brand were still around but you can always find her secondhand. Jeans are secondhand from Everlane, I think the rigid way-high jean which goes up to a size 35. And of course, Birkenstocks, which I never thought I would wear again but here we are.
I have always had a fashion rule that if you wear a big shirt, you should wear small pants and if you wear big pants, you should wear a tiny shirt. But then I thought, what if I broke this rule in the name of frump? Big pants, big shirt? Just try to perceive my body in this outfit. You can’t! Shirt by Revelle, pants secondhand by Lauren Winter via Noihsaf Bazaar.
But I’m not sure if this feels like me. As much as I want to test my own boundaries of what feels transgressively oversized and frumpy, this feels more cumbersome than stylish and I don’t know if that is just me bumping up against my own fears about how much space I take up or if it’s just that I feel like I’m wearing a costume for the sake of testing that boundary. I love these pieces individually but I probably wouldn’t wear them together again.
If you want to try one, big shirts are so easily sourced secondhand! Thrift stores are almost always full of them. Look for 80s or 90s men’s dress shirts in broadcloth that have some structure; the modern poly ones don’t wear as well (but it is good to keep them out of the landfill, so <shrug>). Your choice whether or not to button it all the way down.
By this I mean sexy in the traditional patriarchal sense, to appeal to men.
What I remember about big shirts in the early eighties when I was in college (New England liberal arts school, very preppy) was the difference between how we wore them in real life, all big and blousy, and how the magazines tried to convince us to wear them, with big wide belts etc which seemed to go against all the looseness and comfort of that kind of shirt.
I’ve wondered the same thing about oversized + oversized looks. Do I not like this because I’ve been conditioned to think it’s not “right” or do I genuinely not like it?