A solid collection of shirts is the cornerstone of any decent wardrobe. Menswear has skewed extra-casual over the past decade, but the shirt has survived – not only as the foundation of any formal dress code, but also as a reliable staple that’s easy to wear in any number of contexts across the smart-casual spectrum. Layered under a sweater, over a T-shirt or worn with a suit, there’s perhaps no item that you’ll get more mileage out of. Of course, they come in all stripes. Here, the definitive list of the five shirt types that every man should own.

When it comes to clothes, white is supposed to be a neutral colour. T-shirts, underwear or socks in white or an adjacent tone can be as elevated as you like, but will still be as basic as you can get. The building blocks of an outfit, in essence. And yet, for a blank canvas, a white item of clothing can exude a lot of main-character energy. Especially when worn in tandem with other white pieces.

We’ve long been asking ourselves what could be the menswear equivalent to the “jeans and a nice top” sartorial passe-partout. And we’ve finally got an answer: jeans and a pair of box-fresh white sneakers. That’s for one fundamental reason – white sneakers can be worn with absolutely anything. And although they wouldn’t quite suit a strictly formal dress code, they can still fit the bill if the occasion requires you to take it up a notch.

What’s cooler than being cool? A six-point check list from academics specialising in marketing and consumer behaviour probably isn’t the answer you expected. That hasn’t stopped the authors of “Cool People”, a study recently published in the Journal Of Experimental Psychology, from trying to define the undefinable and quantify cool. After questioning nearly 6,000 respondents from 12 countries – including those beyond Western influence – they’ve drawn up six qualities as a gauge of coolness. And if you ain’t got them, then you ain’t got it.

A solid collection of shirts is the cornerstone of any decent wardrobe. Menswear has skewed extra-casual over the past decade, but the shirt has survived – not only as the foundation of any formal dress code, but also as a reliable staple that’s easy to wear in any number of contexts across the smart-casual spectrum. Layered under a sweater, over a T-shirt or worn with a suit, there’s perhaps no item that you’ll get more mileage out of. Of course, they come in all stripes. Here, the definitive list of the five shirt types that every man should own.

When it comes to clothes, white is supposed to be a neutral colour. T-shirts, underwear or socks in white or an adjacent tone can be as elevated as you like, but will still be as basic as you can get. The building blocks of an outfit, in essence. And yet, for a blank canvas, a white item of clothing can exude a lot of main-character energy. Especially when worn in tandem with other white pieces.