Seven ways to ace the street-style look of the season.

We’ve been saying “aloha” to the vibrant print shirt for several seasons now. It’s a piece that has become a go-to warm-weather staple, even for those who think a camp collar is something Mr Kenneth Williams wore under his white coat in Carry On Doctor. That’s because today’s print shirts, far from being the ill-fitting, polyester-plastered kitsch of yore, are about innovative and inspiring designs allied with modern cuts and subtly luxe fabrics. Scroll down for a plethora of print ideas that pair equally well with poolside piña coladas or city promenading.

Nothing says “Club Tropicana, drinks are free” (thank you, Mr George Michael) like a classic tropical print, but rest assured, today’s fitted cuts and painstaking designs are never going to get you mistaken for a cruise ship habitué or, worse, Mr Tom Selleck in all his thicket-chested Magnum, P.I. pomp. Just look at the striking plumage of this gentleman, who ups the ante by matching print with ink (we’re particularly fond of the way the palm fronds chime with the sternum tattoo), and wearing it nonchalantly enough to let humidity go hang.

Print doesn’t have to err on the side of the baroque or louche. You could opt, instead, for the simple, bold, op-art statement shirt, as sported by this gentleman, where the graphics are as rigorous and dynamic as any bunch of tightly bound pentaquarks you might observe in the Large Hadron Collider. He puts a further kick in the motif by contrasting its hard, bright pop with the softness of the collar and the muted turned-up sleeves, while accentuating the clean lines with his unruly curls and casually slung denim jacket. Which shows that elementary style isn’t rocket science, or, more pertinently in this case, particle physics.

If we were to formulate an equation for the outfit above, it might go something like this: gp = ba when c + s = p(2). Which, as all you sartorial mathematicians will have already have worked out, means geometric print = beyond acceptable when cut + symmetry = perfection (squared). A print this complex needs to be perfectly aligned if you don’t want to feel like you’re looking through a slightly woozy kaleidoscope, while the shirt’s punctilious fit – nipped-in waist, sharp collar – is the perfect foil to its ornate ostentation. In this gentleman’s hands – dialling down the rest of the ensemble, letting it speak for itself – it becomes a prime number.

Hawaii has traditionally been the inspiration for the souvenir shirt, but for the past few seasons, designers from Gucci to SAINT LAURENT have been reorientating their prints eastwards. Thus we’ve been saying “kon’nichiwa” to shirts adorned with tigers, dragons, pagodas, firecrackers, cranes and lotus blossoms, or, in the case of this gentleman, a banquet featuring all of the above, and possibly more. That makes for a somewhat busy whistlestop tour, but he offsets the Asian fusion expertly with a plain white T-shirt and a pair of slouchier navy trousers that should take him from sampling snow crab in Seoul to snacking on sushi in Shoreditch with consummate ease.

Polynesian foliage or serried ranks of dots not droll or outré enough for you? Then you might want to join in the vogue for 1950s-inspired whimsical prints, pioneered by Prada, among others, that can lend your look a retro-avant edge by featuring everything from renderings of vintage cigarette packets to Wild West scenes to, in this particular instance, people getting intimate while floating on clouds. This gentleman accentuates his idiosyncratic smarts by accessorising with a conspicuous designer tee and the kind of stance that says he’ll always be first in his own queue rather than halfway down someone else’s.

If we say the words “animal” and “print”, do they conjure up images of Mr Nigel Tufnel from Spinal Tap in his leopard-print cap-sleeve tee, or American football player Mr Cam Newton in an ill-advised pair of zebra-stripe jeans? Fear not – today’s natural world-inspired motifs won’t leave you looking like a hair-metal parodist or someone who missed the glam-rock express back in 1972. A case in point is the far-from-brutish print on this red wine-shaded shirt, which could feature computer-generated bears, or pandas in conclave, or… well, something vaguely ursine, anyway. It certainly vaults its wearer to a place near the top of the sartorial food chain.

As prints get more audacious, shirt fronts are morphing from the purely decorative into the illustrative, giving rise to a fun new game: name the book/movie/play the shirt might have been based on. In this gentleman’s case, a number of alternatives present themselves: Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them, perhaps, or Wild At Heart. Whatever yarn you’re spinning, a print this striking needs no distractions, so keep things minimal, as this gentleman does. A pair of impeccably neutral jeans and a suitably enigmatic, perhaps-pondering-how-a-unicorn-ended-up-marauding-through-a-modern-metropolis-style expression should more than suffice.

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