Dear Etiquetteer:
Here’s one for you, since you’re Perfectly Proper and an expert. After seeing this blog post, I’ve been having a debate with a male friend about men about what’s proper for how many buttons should be undone on a shirt in a moderately casual but not super familiar situation. What’s your take on this?
Dear Buttoning:
Etiquetteer grew up in the 1970s, a revolutionary — some might say aberrant — period of fashion the way the Roaring Twenties was. A lot of experimentation took place with new forms, fabrics, and ways to wear clothes. The Swinging Seventies gave us the stereotype of the male swinger, neck hung with multiple gold chains and zodiac medallions, and a polyester* shirt open almost to the navel. While one undone button might have been allowed in the 1950s and 1960s, and possibly two — often with a visible white T-shirt beneath — that was considered conservative for the Swinging Seventies. Dear Father kept two buttons undone, and so did Young Etiquetteer. But in popular culture, images of entirely unbuttoned men were not at all unusual.
The pendulum began to swing back by the end of the decade, perhaps with the influence of The Preppy Handbook. Certainly because the swinger stereotype had become a joke. When John Boswell was photographed for the back cover of his book Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality with three buttons disengaged, it was considered Not Quite Perfectly Proper. Etiquetteer cannot tell if he has three or four buttons unbuttoned.
What might be a good guideline now? To look like a gentleman of good taste, one should not look burlesqued**. What décolletage a man shares can remain in the bounds of good taste as long as it doesn’t call undue attention to itself. In the 2020s, more than three un-buttons would be too much, unless it can be carried off with a certain amount of unself-consciousness. One or two would perhaps be in better taste. In the office, where performance counts more than pulchritude, Etiquetteer will allow up to two un-buttons if you’re not wearing a tie — which of course Etiquetteer thinks you should be anyway.
*Often Qiana.
**Dandyism may take men’s fashions to an exaggerated extreme, but its foundation is elegance, mostly protecting it from the charge of burlesque.