AZURE LIKE IT
The French Blue Shirt
Hang in there baby
The following is a recurring internal argument both for and against retaining a French Blue shirt with button-down collars that used to belong to the author’s father. It has been edited for length and clarity.
I like the color. It matches my eyes. It stays.
It makes you look like a waiter from 1995 who wore this tucked in with pressed chinos and a yellow necktie. This shirt says fern bars and Spandau Ballet and can I tell you about our fusilli special with feta and sun dried tomatoes?
OK, but it’s 100% cotton. Feel that. This same shirt would be $85 new in a store.
What store is that? The one where you buy sock garters and mustache wax, Papaw?
I’ve gotten compliments on this shirt. Sometimes you have to look professional.
Who, exactly, is “you” in that sentence? And since when do you give a shit about compliments? (falsetto) Please, please, important people, like my shirt!! I need, I need , I neeeeed!!
Stop that.
You stop it, Jay Gatsby. You are not that guy. You do not need approval. You planned your whole life around never having to wear that shirt.
Wearing the shirt is a gesture of respect. It says I can follow social cues. I adapt to my surroundings. I am a grown-ass man and not some 13-year-old skate punk huffing paint thinner. I don’t ever want to be dismissed because I wore the wrong shirt.
The only “wrong” shirt I can think of is no shirt. Wow. Make sure both of those collars are buttoned down tight, Salary Man.
It’s Normcore, dude. This shirt is so not cool and so far in the middle of the road, it’s actually transgressive. The joke is a deep dive.
Dad wasn’t Normcore. He was just Norm. And he only wore it because somebody bought it for him for Christmas. He’d come back from a restaurant with ranch dressing stains on it.
And Marinara. Red on blue. Brutal.
The only statement you make from wearing his boring shirt in 2022 is, ‘I’m too lazy and tasteless and cheap to buy something from, I don’t know, this century.’ If I call 911, will Queer Eye send a team over here, stat?
Disagree. I’ll totally wear it.
Where? To all those parties and concerts and plays we’ve been going to nonstop for the past two years? Somehow, I doubt the dog still cares about what you wear on the couch.
I could wear it unbuttoned, with a t-shirt underneath.
Yeah. Do that. Maybe that moldy Hüsker Dü T-shirt is still in the back of a drawer somewhere. Next to the last shred of your self-awareness. Worst. Idea. Yet.
Touché. But I’m just so sick of dressing like a tweener on Lexapro for two years. I want to have some options. This is an option.
Slippery slope. People will expect you to dress better from now on. This shirt throws your whole thrift store, X-er, fuck off agenda into jeopardy. Next stop on your fashion adventure? Pocket squares. Eyebrow threading. That Johnny Depp cologne.
It just seems wrong to get rid of it.
It’s wrong to keep it. This shirt reinforces ruthless power hierarchies, obsolete gender roles, calcified conformity. This shirt is the uniform for Team Oppression. This shirt is a velvet rope standing between Humanity and Progress.
Hm.
What possible purpose could a shirt like that serve in the coming apocalypse? Maybe during the Second Civil War we can use it to mop up sucking chest wounds. Then we can burn it. For warmth.
Maybe.
Besides, you’ve got, what, a hundred shirts? Five hundred? Something’s gotta go, bruh. That sound is your closet suffocating.
I like the color. It matched his eyes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
OK, it stays. But we’re not fucking paying for dry cleaning. Deal?
Deal.