French Shirts: A Hot New ‘Trend’ in Men’s Designer Dresswear

French shirt with double collar and silver buttons

If you’re like me you and you care about fashion, you want something that is unique and maybe even trendy, but you don’t want it to go out of style next week either.  When I buy a new piece to add to my wardrobe I want something that I don’t already have, and I want something that my friends don’t have either.  I want something that people will ask me about.  I want something that people haven’t seen but after they see it, they’ll remember it, and they will remember me.  Given these desires, I’m sure you suspect that I have to buy a new shirt every time you go out, but you’d be wrong.  Here’s the thing I’ve found, if you find the right thing to wear, that no one has seen, but has a classic appeal, you’ll be able to get a lot more use out of it than you might expect.

My favorite example of clothing like this is foreign designer dress shirts, and for me, especially French shirts.  French designers are unlike American designers.  The French have much more competition among designers.  The fashion culture is a bit different over there as the big designers have less influence on the style and smaller to midsize design houses are able to make a name for themselves with interesting fashion details that American designers may feel like they don’t have the freedom to attempt given the conservative nature of men’s fashion stateside.  At the same time the French know where they’ve been in fashion and are sure to keep the styles classic.  Yes, they do want to innovate and so they’ll provide you with something you certainly won’t see from any American designers, but also they provide a refined sense of style that’s never cheap or gimmicky.

One brand that typifies this aggressive nature of French shirts is Franck Michel.  They’ve been around since 1969 so you know they aren’t a flash in the pan operation.  Franck Michel have been innovating men’s designer shirt styles for years from their headquarters in the heart of Paris even though you and your friends haven’t heard of them.  They make shirts with styles you haven’t seen either.  When you see them, you’ll love them and wonder why no one else thought of them first.  The devil is in the details with these styles, with things like leather watchband French cuffs and reverse collars to go with their bold patterns and button styles.  You can only find them one place in the states, so if your friends haven’t been to menfashion.com they’ve never seen these shirts and you can have your pick of all their diverse styles with the confidence that no one else is going to have, or have ever even seen a shirt like yours. 

Trends in Men’s Fashion Shirts: The Reverse Collar

Fashion shirts with contrasting reverse collar

In the world of fashion shirts it isn’t good enough anymore just to provide shirts that are slim fitting, or shirts that are made of high quality cotton.  There are simply too many brands out there that have recognized that men appreciate a dress shirt that fits their body the way it should, and that they deserve the highest quality material in the world.  So what separates the hot fashion brands from the imitators?  What makes the difference to men who are looking to drop serious money for a dress shirt that they expect to love?  It’s all in the details.  These days fashion shirt makers are pushing the envelope of the what men expect in a dress shirt with new looks that play on familiar aspects of the traditional dress shirt we all grew up wearing. 

These new fashion designers take an old staple of the dress shirt and flip it on its head.   Take the collar for instance; we are used to seeing a few variants of collars, like the button-down collar and a variety of widths of to suit a range of tie knot styles.  But these types of collars have been available forever (well since Brooks Brothers debuted the button-down collar in 1896) and aren’t going to make anyone take notice of your fashion sense.  If invisibility and anonymity are your thing that’s fine, but today’s fashion designers have turned these details into a chance to express your fashion sense and show your flair for the dramatic.

Take, for instance, the Parisian fashion house Franck Michel.  They’re a leading force in French men’s fashion and a great example of a company making fashion shirts that stand out from the crowd because of their unique approach to old concepts.  Their lineup contains shirts with all manners of double collars, mixing and matching fabrics to make the collar stand out apart from the rest of the shirt.  These double collars however are yesterday’s news in the high fashion world of French design.  What Franck Michel is doing next is pushing the collar in a new direction, quite literally.  The new line offers collars with an extra flip, called a reverse collar.  This previously unseen design is a collar that folds back up and then is held together by stylish buttons on either side.  This allows an interplay between two colors of fabric as we now are privileged to see the fabric choice on the underside of the collar, which in the case of trendy French fashion shirts, is of course a contrasting color, and often has a bold pattern.  These reverse collar shirts are just starting to make a splash stateside, and are as unique as you’ll see in the world of fashion dress shirts.