Shorter shirt hems are seen during New York Fashion Week in September. Photo: The New York Times
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 US$1,590 (approximately RM6,666) zip-up shirt that lands flat at a few inches below the waist. The 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.
Men’s button-ups are becoming brazenly more abbreviated, sometimes creeping up above the belt line. Photo: The New York TimesMadewell sells a “straight-hem” shirt for US$88 (RM369). Levi’s offers a similarly abbreviated shirt at US$80 (RM335).
Neither would cover more than a sliver of the back pocket of your jeans.
Read more: Is this the year of barrel pants, or have they already become a chic classic?
Abercrombie & Fitch is shrunken shirt heartland of the US. 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, 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.
“I bought a little fabric-cutting kit on Amazon that came with a rotary cutter,” said Shan Molu, 32, a product manager in Atlanta who has spliced button-ups to baby-doll proportions.
Andrew Buck, 27, a software engineer in New York was one of many men who endorsed thrifting cheapy vintage button-ups and slicing off the undesired ends.
“You can transform them yourself.”
Robinson said that after observing this at-home hemming, Abercrombie pushed further into the cropped top.
“Not every guy is going to feel comfortable cutting off his own shirt,” he said.
The shortened shirt could really be called the jelly to the big pants peanut butter. Men’s pants have been inflating in width for years. A shortened top provides proportional balance.
“If you wear a longer, baggier tee with pants like that, it makes you look frumpy,” Buck said. “It makes you look short. Adding a shorter, smaller top breaks that up.”
“As the baggy jeans were introduced, that’s the start of the era of you cutting clothes,” said Francis Reece Jimeno, 29, a barista in Brooklyn.
Men’s button-ups have shrunken before. In the aughts, when men’s fashion tilted tighter, labels like APC, Band Of Outsiders and Steven Alan sold slinky dress shirts, like prep school uniforms subject to a few too many dryer cycles.
Today, though, shorn hemlines are also a testament to how far the conservative dress shirt’s prospects have fallen. Photo: The New York Times
Today, things are sharper (shirts now mostly feature a flat or flat-ish hem) and brazenly more abbreviated, creeping up above the belt line.
Wear one while extending for a wineglass and skin will show.
That’s the intent. When exposed ankles and bare arms have become banal, the belly – soft, toned or in between – is again capturing focus as a male erogenous zone.
“If I cut my shirt, then I can showcase my tattoos,” Jimeno said.
Read more: Retro restyled: Fashion revives vintage aesthetics with a modern, wearable edge
In a way, we’re watching a 1990s fad reborn.
In those navel-peeking Abercrombie button-ups, we can see the strands of Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden in 1999’s Fight Club, selling soap in a gawky shirt that barely covers his midriff.
Today, though, shorn hemlines are also a testament to how far the conservative dress shirt’s prospects have fallen.
“There’s a casualisation of the entire market,” said Robinson, who added that short-sleeve button-up shirts, which a decade ago “were kind of thought about for dads”, has similarly seized the company’s teen and 20-something shoppers.
It’s a look visible on Lochlan (played by Sam Nivola) the curly-haired moppet from the latest season of The White Lotus.
“If you’re going to the office and it’s business casual, where you’re not necessarily required to tuck your shirt in, then, yeah, I think a lot of people are leaning more toward that shorter, boxier look,” Molu said.
“It just feels a little more casual.” – ©2025 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
