Why the button-up shirt is ageless and classic

Who doesn’t love a button-up? 

The button-up shirt is a wardrobe staple. Timeless and versatile, you’d be hard-pressed to find a closet that doesn’t contain some kind of long-sleeve button-up. In fact, to celebrate the sartorial favourite, Country Road has re-released its iconic 1984 chambray button-up shirt, which inspired us to look back at the button-up’s roots.

The button-up shirt has seen many iterations over the hundreds of years it’s been worn, with perhaps two of the most common styles being the crisp, white button-up and the chambray button-up.

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Chambray has an interesting history that stretches back further than you might expect. Despite its resemblance to denim, chambray actually pre-dates denim by hundreds of years. Its origins lay in France in the 1500s when chambray was made using linen rather than cotton, which it’s now typically constructed from.

The fabric’s dense weave and lightweight feel made it a comfortable and durable fabric option for work shirts, becoming a popular choice in the 1900s. This is where the distinction between white-collar and blue-collar workers comes from – industrial workers wore chambray or denim shirts while business and finance workers wore white button-up shirts.

The chambray work shirt became part of the uniform for the US Navy during this time, up until the end of World War II. You can see the chambray shirt depicted in countless propaganda posters from the era, including the famous 1943 “We Can Do It!” poster by J. Howard Miller.

So how did a work shirt become such a popular contemporary wardrobe staple? We probably have Hollywood icons Marilyn Monroe and James Dean to thank for that. Post-World War II, Hollywood stars started to don casual wardrobes heavy on blues jeans and button-ups, setting the trend for the younger generation at the time.

While button-up shirts designed for women were typically more fitted than the free-flowing men’s version, they’ve evolved to become a unisex style that can be worn undone as an overshirt, tied around the waist, buttoned-up, tucked in or out, or pretty much however you want to style it.

Harking back to its original design, for the reissue of its classic button-up Country Road is returning to one of the Melbourne factories that it originally worked with back in the ’80s. The brand is also opting for Australian cotton to strengthen its support for local sourcing.

And while it’s received some updates – in founder Stephen Bennett’s words, “it’s a far better shirt than the original one” – it truly captures the essence of the original, right down to the inclusion of the same tag that was sewn into Country Road’s chambray shirts in the ’80s.

You can shop Country Road’s reissued chambray shirt here.