If Robert Redford’s on-screen contribution to men’s style is usually regarded as being period pieces The Sting (1973) or The Great Gatsby (1974), this is to allow the serious oversight of his more everyman role, just over 50 years ago, in the thriller Three Days of the Condor. There’s his combination of hiking boots, boot-cut jeans and tweed jacket. But the star of the show? That chambray shirt.
Sure, Redford’s CIA analyst wears his with loose-knitted tie. Yet it’s the very fabric of his shirt that resonates with a counter-cultural cool; that manages to be both orderly and relaxed in a way, say, neither a crisper, more formal poplin, nor the crumpled, floaty look of linen can pull off. If the former is somehow always at the office, the latter is always at the beach club.
‘That’s the thing about a chambray shirt – it’s soft but still looks sharp,’ agrees the menswear designer Oliver Spencer. ‘It’s the fabric’s balance of lightweight, slightly slubby texture and dryness that means it’s cool for the summer but hardy enough for the winter too. Chambray just makes for a really good blue shirt. And to my mind it has to be blue. That’s the traditional look.’
By ‘traditional’, Spencer is referring to chambray’s origins in workwear and the military – a history that helps make it shirting’s answer to denim, with the same touch of blue-collar machismo. Chambray, after all, may have originated as a light-blue linen fabric in the French town of Cambrai, way back in the mid-1500s, but three centuries later, and now made from cotton, it became the go-to choice for farm labourers.
They appreciated it for being hard-wearing but also breathable – in a chambray shirt you could stay as cool as if wearing just your undergarments, but had more protection from the sun. That same benefit would soon appeal to ranch hands – chambray would become a default choice for cowboys and, in fact, Redford’s shirt is all sawtooth pockets and pearl poppers – as it might to sailors. In 1901 the US Navy selected chambray as the shirting fabric of its standard-issue uniform, remaining as such for enlisted men right through to the end of World War Two. The officer class, of course, wore khaki.
It’s perhaps a little ironic then that, like so many workmanlike fabrics, it took upwards appropriation by the students of Ivy League universities during the late 1950s and 60s for chambray to be repurposed as something far more patrician – giving its wearer the effect of hard physical work without, you know, actually needing to leave the well-stocked library. Today, labourers wear polyester overalls and high-vis, while chambray is more Ralph Lauren or Lora Piana. Let’s just say that chambray still works very hard when it comes to looking good.
GOOD TO KNOW
The chambray shirt also dressed the workers of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression before becoming the definitive garment of America’s industrialisation. In fact, so closely associated with manual labour did chambray become that Elvis Presley would wear it for a film role but reportedly refused to do so off-set, so much did it remind him of his dirt poor sharecropper roots.
