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Should An Undershirt Show Beneath A Dress Shirt - Men's Under Shirts - Fashion & Style
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Hi! I'm Antonio Centeno, the founder of Real Men Real Style. Today, we're going to be talking
about undershirts and should an undershirt ever peek out from under a dress shirt.
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Okay. This is the question that came in. "Dear Antonio, I would like to first say I love
your videos, very informative and you're my inspiration to dress sharp." Well, thank you,
sir. "When it comes to dress shirts and the single button, the very top one I'm speaking
of is undone, should an undershirt ever show? Does it look bad if it shows? Thanks. Chris."
Okay, Chris, good question and something we see all the time especially in the corporate
world where you have tons of men wearing these blue dress shirts and then you see this white
undershirt that's just hugging the bottom of their neck. The question is what are the
rules on this and is that acceptable?
Now, there are two camps here, and you can go check out The Undershirt Guy. Tug, he runs
this website and they've debated this quite a bit, and there isn't a true answer because
it really depends on you and your situation, and I'm going to explain why.
So for the camp that says "no", and I kind of fall in that camp, unless you fit a certain
description, which I'll talk about later, for most men, I look at it as you're really
showing your underwear. Most of us don't like it whenever you see somebody and they're wearing
their pants low and you can see that the whole -- basically, you can see their ***. That's
not what we're looking for when it comes to men's style. I know that is a particular type
of style in certain areas, but I don't like to see men's underwear.
The same is for the top and we've kind of gotten away from that. A lot of people don't
really even view undershirts as underwear. They're wearing them as outerwear, but for
these intents and purposes, you are wearing it as underwear because it's under your dress
shirt, so why would you want to show it? That's probably the first thing that I really don't
like.
The other one is there's the contrast. Now, you want contrast on the necktie because it's
beautiful and you want to draw attention to the silk going around your neck. Perhaps you
want to have a dress shirt that's got a bit of a contrast on the inside of the collar,
but why would you want to draw attention especially with a blue shirt or something of another
color to the white contrast right below your Adam's apple? I don't know why you would want
to have contrast right there, again, pointing out something that is your underwear.
Finally, I think that wearing a V-neck undershirt whenever you are leaving the button undone,
which is what I do. I've got an undershirt on made by a company called RibbedTee, great
company, by the way. I've done a review on them, but in any case, I wear their V-neck
undershirts because I love not having to button this top button on my shirts as you can tell,
and you cannot tell that I'm wearing an undershirt, but I can tell because when I take off my
clothing, I realize that my dress shirt is not going to be soiled in the armpits or anything
even though I've been doing these videos for a while this morning and I've been sweating.
I'm not going to have to worry about laundering this dress shirt as much. Instead, I'll just
launder this less expensive undershirt.
Okay, so those are the reasons I'm in the "no" camp, but the "yes" camp has got some
good reasons and I would say if you've got a lot of chest hair, then this makes sense
because if I had a huge mat right here and if I had hair popping out, no matter what
I'm saying, I bet there would be somebody out there on YouTube that's just focusing
on all this chest hair coming right out and they're not going to be thinking, "Wow! That's
incredible." Well, maybe they will be thinking that's incredibly manly, but they're going
to be thinking, "Man, that guy is Tom Selleck reincarnated," or something.
It's something that's distracting. And so, you don't want a distracting patch of hair
coming out from under there, and I know a lot of guys who've got that. They try to trim
it a bit, but they also realize that throwing on an undershirt helps keep that under control
and it shows that they try to take steps to manage that.
And then there are also men who have tattoos or scars or birthmarks which they just don't
want people -- they would rather draw attention to that little bit of the undershirt than
have people notice that they've got maybe a tattoo that they picked up when they were
20 years old or that they've got a birthmark that they just don't want people seeing, or
a mole or something. In that case, it makes perfect sense.
Now, if you really don't care, I would say that when it comes to the totem pole of men's
style, this is pretty far down there so it's not super important. But it is something,
if you're looking to up your game or you're in a corporate environment, I would try switching
to the V-neck undershirt. I think it's a great compromise. You're not going to lose protection.
I'm not a big fan of the sleeveless, the ones that they call wife beaters. I don't like
that term. In any case, I don't think they offer the right type of protection either.
So that's my answer. I hope you like it. I'd like to hear from you guys in the comments
and I will see you in the next video. Bye-bye.