The simplicity of the white shirt makes it a foolproof option when you just can’t decide what to wear. Just think Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana – and the French
These days, when I really don’t know what to wear, I wear a white shirt. It took me a long time to figure this out, but I’m glad I got there in the end. What I realised was that a wardrobe crisis is about identity, not clothes. It is about using clothes as a metric for squaring who you are with what other people see; about ambition or impostor syndrome. A wardrobe crisis isn’t really a fashion problem, so piling on the trends only confuses things further. On days when the prospect of getting dressed feels problematic and fraught, a white shirt brings you back to serenity
In her years as a celebrity stylist who worked with Carey Mulligan, Meryl Streep, Florence Welch, Ellie Goulding and Anna Calvi, Lauren Grant found that a white shirt was often the trump card on her clothes rail. “The classic white shirt or blouse makes every woman look a little bit more French, which is never a bad thing,” she says. This month, Grant has launched her quirky takes on the classic white shirt with a new label, Sark. It is the new kid on the block in a growing niche of high-fashion shirt specialists. Palmer Harding is an east London-based brand with broad-spectrum appeal – collections have been inspired by Helmut Newton and celebrity fans include Theresa May. It has become a fashion-week favourite for its white shirts (or, at a push, pale blue) elevated with portrait collars or ruffled asymmetric hems.
At Sark (Scots for “shirt”, a name inspired by Grant’s Glaswegian mum), the devil is in the detail. There is a Valley of the Dolls vibe to the first collection: the Fake Nail blouse has glossy red talons for buttons, the Prozac blouse fastens with a row of green-and-white metal capsules. Grant borrowed the red nails idea from Guy Bourdin’s classic image, first seen in French Vogue in 1970, of a red-lipped model whose eyes are covered with several hands’ worth of red talons. Grant says: “I mixed that image with memories of my mother’s beautifully painted red nails before she used to go out in the 90s and my early (unsuccessful) attempts to re-create the look by going to Boots and buying Sally Hansen stick-ons for £1.”
