Victoria Beckham has positioned herself as a pop star, mother, perfumier, TikToker and fashion designer. But whatever job next month’s Netflix documentary focuses on – details are scant, but it’s thought the early October series will end at her Paris catwalk show – she will always be scrutinised over how she looks. How to temper that? Wear a plain white shirt.
The documentary poster released this week shows Beckham wearing a diamond tennis bracelet, open-collar white shirt – and nothing else. Last week, the Princess of Wales appeared in public at the Natural History Museum, also in a plain white shirt. Earlier this month, the Duchess of Sussex launched her Netflix series in a white shirt (one of seven in fact), and when Taylor Swift recently announced her new album she did so wearing a white shirt. Laura Dern wore hers twice at the Venice film festival, and the woman with the most enviable wardrobe in fashion – Sarah Jessica Parker – chose a billowing version to promote her role as Booker prize judge.
In a pleasing twist, Kate and Meghan’s shirts were from the same British brand, With Nothing Underneath, which has grown by 130% this year owing to a roaring trade in oversized three-figure poplin numbers. At the cheaper end, sales of white shirts shot up 33% this month at John Lewis. An open-back version is the big hit at Hush this week, while a more fitted version was among the bestsellers for the newly relaunched The White Company.
A relatively unappreciated garment redolent of boardrooms, the crisp white shirt briefly lost its place in the working woman’s wardrobe during the pandemic before returning in a new context. That is, “slightly oversized and worn without a jacket”, says Naomi Pike, commissioning editor of Elle and a white-shirt wearer.
“It’s classic back-to-school energy, however grown up you are, so I suppose that means the antithesis of summer dressing.” Whether you’re promoting a new TV show or a lifestyle guru making french toast, “it’s the easiest way to show you’re back – and back at it”.
Beckham, who wore a white one throughout the 2023 Beckham documentary, has always deferred to shirts. Her 2019 collection featured at least five different styles. But as someone who has always understood image creation, she understands the difference between power dressing and soft-power dressing, says Pike, who describes white shirts as workwear that somehow hides in plain sight.
“It’s completely background, it’s silent, but it does the heavy lifting with not much effort,” she says. Despite its formality, the white shirt relies on the whims of context: worn with a jacket, it feels staid. Worn on its own, it’s pulled together without being corporate. If you undo some buttons like Victoria, or roll up the sleeves like Meghan, or hide it under a jumper like Gwyneth Paltrow at the Michael Kors show this week, “there is no item of clothing which can be changed with so little effort”.
Its power, says Pike, is in its nothingness. These are women who can afford to wear anything. But when men wear one, “they look like they’ve been dressed by their mums”.
White shirts, the backbone garment of work leisure – that halfway house between uniform and not – hit the big time when women entered the workforce during the early 20th century and needed something loose to wear. Popularised by Coco Chanel, iconified by Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday (her popped collar started a new trend) and Diane Keaton in Annie Hall, it became a go-to on the Donna Karan and Calvin Klein catwalks, beloved by the 90s It girl Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, who wore hers with slim jeans and a red lip.
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But its roots go back further, arguably to the 18th century and Marie Antoinette. A new V&A exhibition exploring her style features a 1783 portrait by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s of the doomed queen wearing a white chemise, or shirt-style dress. Its neoclassical shape, “which was diaphanous while also somehow clingy, was an early example of power dressing, and very fashion forward”, says the senior curator, Dr Sarah Grant. “The most modern thing about it was how plain and loose it was – but that was also very seductive.”
In 1782’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses, there’s a scene in which a woman is wearing a muslin shirt-style dress, and Valmont is thrilled because it’s easier to remove. “It’s basically underwear,” says Grant. Like most fashion, the chemise was a reaction to what came before it, which was something more formal. But combined with its sultriness and unpatriotic fabric (it was made of muslin rather than French silk) the portrait became so controversial it was removed from the Salon of 1783.
An exercise in soft-power branding in which sales almost doubled last year, Victoria Beckham’s success has largely been built on creating clothes – and makeup – for women who want to look like her. Likewise, when Marie Antoinette wore her chemise, like the latest Gucci handbag or Chanel handbag, “it too became the thing that everyone wanted”.
