Dress For Success: The Crisp White Dress Shirt

Dress shirts are a must for any mans wardrobe regardless of how stylish you think you are or are not. Dress shirts used for formal occasions, work outfits and even casual jeans-and-shirts combo. Good shirts are an investment, too. They are not easy to find and they are often not very cheap. As a guy, you have to know how to take care of this style staple properly and make it last for as long as possible.

Proper Shirt Care
The key to making your dress shirts last is to establish a routine for maintaining them. For example, make it a habit to check your dress shirts for rips, loose threads or missing buttons before wearing. Have a set formula when laundering shirts (gentle cycle and regular detergent with lukewarm water is best), or at least have one or two trusted laundry shops to handle all your shirts.

If you wash your shirts yourself, always separate your shirts into coloreds, darks and whites before you get washing. Bleaches like Clorox can be used to maintain the color of your white shirts. Not everything can be bleached, though, so be sure to check the care label first. You can then use special bleaches that usually available at the supermarket for the darks and the coloreds to help prolong their colors.

Steam irons are best for dress shirts because the steam gently helps straighten out all the wrinkles and kinks. A flat iron can do just as well, provided that you dampen the shirt with a wet cloth or a spray bottle before ironing. If a shirt is only slightly wrinkled, such as when it has spent too long in a crowded closet, consider just steaming it down instead of ironing it directly. The latter is friendlier to the fabric while smoothing everything down.

One of the cardinal rules of shirt maintenance is to never use starch, even if you want to make a white shirt even crisper. The starch causes additional wear and tear on the shirt, weakening the fabric. The next time you wear a starched shirt, it will be droopy and saggy because the starch made the cotton weaker. Instead of starching a regular shirt, get a quality shirt with a high thread count to get that crisp effect.

Shirts vs. Stains
Dry-cleaning your shirts, even custom-made or designer jobs, is a bad idea because the dry cleaning solutions are vicious on the shirs fabric. There is a good chance that a shirt will come back from the dry cleaners blotched with yellow or, even worse, discolored to the shade of old parchment.

Stains are your shirts worst enemy, especially if you have several clean white shirts. Deodorants and antiperspirants are a common culprit, making for unsightly yellowish spots at the underarms. If you do not want to wear an undershirt, use special antiperspirant sticks that do not transfer to fabrics. Alternatively, you could also use spray-on antiperspirants, and then just wait for the stuff to dry before wearing your shirt.

Always make a thorough inspection of your shirts before ironing them, and put stained or soiled ones back to the wash pronto. Ironing shirts with stains or other chemicals still on them will create indelible stains, permanently ruining an otherwise great shirt. Be meticulous about it; even the smallest spots or blotches can make a crisp white shirt look unsightly.

Shirts are a necessity in every male wardrobe. Take proper care of them, and they should be giving you more mileage at cocktail parties, nights at the bar and days at the office.

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