What Will Be the Defining Shirt of Summer 2025? Menswear Experts Weigh In

Just about every summer, it feels like one specific style of shirt jumps to the head of the menswear pack. We’ve seen loudly patterned camp shirts and natty knit polos transform from midcentury artifacts to bona fide trends. Lace and crocheted shirts, meanwhile, rocketed from bespoke boutiques to mainstream retailers in the blink of an eye just a couple of years back.

Which begs the question: Which shirt will reign supreme during the summer of 2025? Should you be investing in boxy button-ups or airy slogan tees? Whose stock is rising and what’s on the way out? We called up a handful of serious men’s style pros for their predictions.

Nick Wooster, fashion consultant

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For Nick Wooster—a menswear industry mainstay and street style legend who’s kept his finger on the pulse for decades—a great summer shirt rotation all starts with building a solid foundation. If you don’t have perfect blue and white shirts—a blue-and-white stripe, a solid blue, a solid white—then you should start there,” he says.

Wooster’s preferred shirting brands are Comme des Garçons Shirt, the legendary Japanese label’s button-down-focused offshoot, and Charvet, the age-old Parisian dress shirt purveyor. “For me, the perfect beach shirt is not a T-shirt,” he says, “but a white Charvet shirt that you’ve washed and have not ironed, and you wear that over a bathing suit.” It’s a look, he contends, that can easily take you from a day lounging by the pool or ocean directly to a restaurant or bar at night.

While Wooster believes that a long-sleeve shirt with the sleeves rolled up will always look more polished than short sleeves, he concedes that it’s hard to beat the ease and comfort of the latter. “It’s just easier sometimes to have on a short-sleeve shirt from Needles or Engineered Garments or Officine Générale,” he says. “There are tasteful short-sleeved shirts that I feel you can wear, and you’re not drawing attention with a big print.”

Tony Parrotti, designer, Tony Shirtmakers

Courtesy of Tony Parrotti

Like Wooster, designer Tony Parrotti is fond of wearing long-sleeved shirts throughout the spring and summer. You’re gonna sweat either way, he argues, so you might as well choose the more stylish option. “There’s something really elegant about still sticking with a long sleeve in the summer,” says Parrotti, who worked as a shirtmaker for a bespoke tailor in New York City before launching the cult-loved Tony Shirtmakers in Damariscotta, Maine.

The label’s newly-launched dress shirt is proof of Parrotti’s commitment to midsummer long sleeves. This isn’t your average stiff, starched, office-ready dress shirt we’re talking about; it comes in laundered Japanese cotton, a breezy and lightweight fabric with a crinkled texture. “It’s treated to basically look like the perfectly wrinkled hung-dry shirt, which is what I love about it,” explains Parrotti. “You could still wear this under a suit to a wedding. And then you can wear this in your daily life: untucked, breezy, and boxy.”

Jian DeLeon, men’s fashion director, Nordstrom

Courtesy of Jian Deleon

With a brass ring job at one of America’s most storied department stores, Jian DeLeon makes it his business to know what stylish dudes are wearing. And lately, the longtime staple of the New York menswear scene has noticed men gravitating to two garments in particular: knit T-shirts and cropped, boxy, short-sleeved button-ups.