Stop Dressing Like Every Other Guy: Give Up Your Gingham Shirts

ON A RECENT VISIT to a Manhattan bar, I counted four men wearing what appeared to be the exact same blue-and-white gingham button-up shirt. I’d witnessed this scene many times before: For the past decade the gingham shirt has been the men’s fashion equivalent of the unkillable “Blob” that Steve McQueen battled on-screen in 1958. So many men own an iteration of the checked standby—particularly the version sold by J. Crew—that in 2014 an Instagram account, @ThatJCrewGinghamShirt began documenting its ubiquity. The feed’s 17,000-plus followers chuckle at photos of men, often several at once, snapped in their shirts at the...