A recession of sorts has hit the men’s clothing industry. Tops — sweaters and tees but, significantly, dress shirts as well — are shrinking at the hem like an eroding shoreline. Unfortunately, their prices don’t seem to be shrinking along with them.
Louis Vuitton offers an abridged $1,590 zip-up shirt that lands flat at a few inches below the waist. The Vuitton website bills it as a “fashion-forward cotton shirt.” Coach’s recent New York Fashion Week runway show featured scoop-cheeked models in tees and sweaters shrunken nearly to the navel. Eckhaus Latta showed a button-up shirt that stopped well above the waistline. (Sleeves were also absent, revealing even more skin.)
But if shirttails are threatened in higher fashion, they’re already endangered at mall labels.
Madewell sells a “straight-hem” shirt for $88. Levi’s offers a similarly abbreviated shirt at $80. Neither would cover more than a sliver of the back pocket of your jeans. Abercrombie & Fitch is America’s shrunken shirt heartland: Its website offers 68 styles of men’s “crop” button-ups. “What the customer’s buying today is a looser fitting shirt that’s just shorter,” said Corey Robinson, the chief product officer at Abercrombie & Fitch, which caters to customers of the iPhone generation, not the Walkman generation. “This is a microtrend” for them, Mr. Robinson said.
In pursuit of a slinkier shape, men are also pulling from the women’s racks. Mostly, though, they’re shearing their shirts themselves. TikTok is littered with tutorial after tutorial on how to sever shirttails from your bedroom.
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