THE JOURNAL
Not For Wallflowers: Why A Super-Bold Bowling Shirt Is Your Secret Weapon This Summer
From left: Mr Michael B Jordan in Malibu, 4 July 2022. Photograph by Backgrid. Mr Seth Rogen in Los Angeles, 22 June 2022. Photograph by Backgrid. Mr Jonah Hill in Malibu, 7 July 2022. Photograph by The Mega Agency
It is rare that the piece of clothing that shouts the loudest is the most stylish. But the best shirts around right now are the ones that are designed to make you do a double-take. They are invariably in the style of an old bowling shirt, but with prints bold enough to scare your elderly relatives, and are marked out by their head-turning artwork. If the print on your shirt doesn’t look at home on the walls of the edgiest art gallery in your neighbourhood or in the wardrobe of a Sopranos extra, it’s not bold enough.
The charm of a garish bowling shirt doesn’t just come from the fact that it makes you look more interesting than you are. A sufficiently madcap print will do most of the heavy lifting in an outfit. Get it right and the rest will follow.
The actors Messrs Seth Rogen, Michael B Jordan and Jonah Hill have caught our eye lately with their preference for an outré bowling shirt. Rogen’s red and pink camp-collar shirt is from Needles. He’s paired it with a pair of minimal grey slacks and a white baseball cap. See what we said about heavy lifting? Jordan’s flag-print number is by BODE and, again, it pulls together the rest of his outfit.
“A sufficiently madcap print will do most of the heavy lifting in an outfit. Get it right and the rest will follow”
When hunting down a wacky and wonderful bowling shirt, there are plenty of options on MR PORTER, but CELINE HOMME, Wacko Maria and NOMA t.d. do them particularly well. Endless Joy is a veritable master of the bold printed shirt. It makes some of the most notable printed shirts on the market and decorates them with genuinely epic artwork that is by turns evangelical and morbid. Ancient bacchanals dance across the sleeves and skeletons peek out from behind palm fronds. It’s fantastical stuff, straight from the pages of a nightmarish storybook.
Not all printed shirts are made equal. Aloha shirts might be a trusty option for summer, but why play it safe when there are so many flashier options out there? There is nothing wrong with a floral shirt, of course, but why have hyacinths and daisies when you could have demons, tigers or a troupe of tiny hula dancers?
The people featured in this story are not associated with and do not endorse MR PORTER or the products shown