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Just about every summer, it feels like one specific style of shirt jumps to the head of the menswear pack. We’ve seen loudly patterned camp shirts and natty knit polos transform from midcentury artifacts to bona fide trends. Lace and crocheted shirts, meanwhile, rocketed from bespoke boutiques to mainstream retailers in the blink of an eye just a couple of years back.
Which begs the question: Which shirt will reign supreme during the summer of 2025? Should you be investing in boxy button-ups or airy slogan tees? Whose stock is rising and what’s on the way out? We called up a handful of serious men’s style pros for their predictions.
For Nick Wooster—a menswear industry mainstay and street style legend who’s kept his finger on the pulse for decades—a great summer shirt rotation all starts with building a solid foundation. If you don't have perfect blue and white shirts—a blue-and-white stripe, a solid blue, a solid white—then you should start there,” he says.
Wooster’s preferred shirting brands are Comme des Garçons Shirt, the legendary Japanese label’s button-down-focused offshoot, and Charvet, the age-old Parisian dress shirt purveyor. “For me, the perfect beach shirt is not a T-shirt,” he says, “but a white Charvet shirt that you’ve washed and have not ironed, and you wear that over a bathing suit.” It’s a look, he contends, that can easily take you from a day lounging by the pool or ocean directly to a restaurant or bar at night.
While Wooster believes that a long-sleeve shirt with the sleeves rolled up will always look more polished than short sleeves, he concedes that it’s hard to beat the ease and comfort of the latter. “It’s just easier sometimes to have on a short-sleeve shirt from Needles or Engineered Garments or Officine Générale,” he says. “There are tasteful short-sleeved shirts that I feel you can wear, and you're not drawing attention with a big print.”
Like Wooster, designer Tony Parrotti is fond of wearing long-sleeved shirts throughout the spring and summer. You’re gonna sweat either way, he argues, so you might as well choose the more stylish option. “There’s something really elegant about still sticking with a long sleeve in the summer,” says Parrotti, who worked as a shirtmaker for a bespoke tailor in New York City before launching the cult-loved Tony Shirtmakers in Damariscotta, Maine.
The label’s newly-launched dress shirt is proof of Parrotti's commitment to midsummer long sleeves. This isn’t your average stiff, starched, office-ready dress shirt we’re talking about; it comes in laundered Japanese cotton, a breezy and lightweight fabric with a crinkled texture. “It’s treated to basically look like the perfectly wrinkled hung-dry shirt, which is what I love about it,” explains Parrotti. “You could still wear this under a suit to a wedding. And then you can wear this in your daily life: untucked, breezy, and boxy.”
With a brass ring job at one of America’s most storied department stores, Jian DeLeon makes it his business to know what stylish dudes are wearing. And lately, the longtime staple of the New York menswear scene has noticed men gravitating to two garments in particular: knit T-shirts and cropped, boxy, short-sleeved button-ups.
“A knit T-shirt is a great, elevated substitute to wear underneath a sport coat,” he says, pointing to how it slides right into the “tousled tailoring vibe” that is having a moment right now.
The appeal of the boxy button-up, meanwhile lies in the desire to play into proportions and silhouettes. “It’s the perfect way to balance out a pair of oversized shorts or wider pants with a slightly higher rise. It’s definitely a look you’ll probably clock in places like Dimes Square in New York City or other hotspots for seeing TikTok trends IRL.”
According to Jasmine Benjamin—who has styled the likes of Donald Glover, Anderson .Paak, and Miguel and recently authored the upcoming City of Angels—this summer is all about going boxy and cropped.
“Whether it’s a T-shirt or camp-style shirt, it’s going to be a boxier fit,” Benjamin says. You want perfectly oversized basics that feel “lived-in and modern.” And while she notes you can never go wrong with a quintessential white T-shirt, Benjamin also thinks “we’ll start seeing more graphic T-shirts” again in 2025. It’s less about logo tees, however, and more about slogans—like the droll, sharply-designed versions from California designer Eli Russell Linnetz’s ERL.
Fashion industry vets James Scully and Tom Mendenhall run the idiosyncratically curated shop Jamestown Hudson in upstate New York. “The store is an extension of our closet and we both appreciate a slight sense of humor when we dress,” says Scully. The duo noticed that many of their favorite eccentric summertime staples—like patchwork madras, Hawaiian prints, and heavy indigo dyes—have been harder to find on store racks recently. Not so at Jamestown. “This summer we were surprised to see [the return of] a big variety of shirt styles that men usually won’t gravitate to,” Scully adds, “like band collars, slimmer 1950s short sleeves, and popovers.”
Mendenhall is particularly thrilled with the vibrant madras shirts the pair sourced from Sage de Cret, the prep-leaning Tokyo label from designer Kimitoshi Chida.“Bright madras plaids have made a huge comeback from the most unconventional places,” he says, “especially from the Japanese brands we carry where it’s taken out of context and feels totally new.”