The Best Vests and Undershirts You Can Actually Buy
The best men's vests and undershirts, sorted by job: singlet, fine rib, deep scoop, merino base layer and technical sweat vest, with who should skip each one.
The Undershirt Under a Dress Shirt: Six Rules
A vest under a business shirt is invisible and excellent or visible and a disaster. Six undershirt rules, including the colour almost everybody gets wrong.
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The vest under a business shirt is a binary garment. Done properly it is invisible, it keeps you dry through a warm meeting, and it adds several years to the life of shirts that cost real money. Done badly it is a white neckline peering over an open collar in every photograph from the conference, and a set of strap outlines visible through poplin under strip lighting.
The gap between those two outcomes is six decisions, and none of them are difficult.
1. Skin tone, not white
The counterintuitive one, and the one most men get wrong for their entire lives. A white vest under a white or pale blue shirt is highly visible, because it creates a bright, opaque block behind a semi-transparent cloth and the edges of that block show as clear lines.
A vest in your own skin tone disappears. So, nearly as well, does light grey. Buy skin tone for pale shirts, keep white for wearing on its own or under dark cloth, and watch the problem vanish. skin tone undershirt 3-pack
2. Sleeves, and specifically short ones
A sleeveless vest is cooler and it does not protect the shirt where the shirt actually gets ruined, which is under the arm. If the point of the exercise is saving shirts from sweat rings and deodorant staining, the sleeve has to be there.
Short sleeved crew or V-neck for business. Sleeveless for summer weekends, sleeping and open shirts. short sleeve crew undershirt A Field Guide to Vests: Singlet to Base Layer
3. The neckline goes below the collar opening
Work out how you actually wear your shirts. Top button done up under a tie for most of the day: a crew neck sits fine and gives more coverage. Top button open, ever, at any point: you need a V-neck, and if you wear your collar properly open you need a deep V.
The test takes four seconds in a mirror before you leave the house, and it is the difference between a garment nobody knows about and a garment everybody can see. deep V-neck undershirt
4. Fitted, and long enough
A vest should skim the torso closely. Loose fabric under a shirt bunches at the waistband, wrinkles across the back when you sit, and prints its own folds through the shirt in exactly the way you were trying to avoid.
Length matters just as much and is the thing cheap vests fail at. It must stay tucked when you raise both arms, or it will ride up over the course of a day and gather at your ribs, which is the least comfortable place fabric can be. How a Brief Should Actually Fit
5. Fine fabric only
Under tailoring the fabric has to be thin enough to disappear. Fine cotton jersey, fine gauge merino, or a cotton and modal blend. Heavy rib, waffle knits and anything textured belong under a jumper rather than under a dress shirt, because texture reads through poplin the same way a seam does.
Merino is the quiet luxury option here and it earns its price in two specific situations: long days in warm rooms, and travel, where it can be worn several days without complaint. fine merino undershirt The Winter Base Layer: How to Be Warm Without Looking Like a Bin Bag
6. Retire them honestly
A vest is a consumable protecting a durable. That is its job and it means the vest is supposed to wear out first: greying, stretching at the neck, staining under the arm. When it does, it has succeeded, and you replace three vests instead of three shirts.
Men who keep a vest until it is translucent have misunderstood the economics of their own wardrobe.
The business case, in one paragraph
Take the price of the shirts you actually wear to work and multiply by however many you own. Then consider that the two things that kill those shirts are sweat and deodorant, that both arrive from the same two square inches, and that a three-pack of vests intercepts all of it for less than the cost of one shirt. Add that you will be visibly drier in a warm meeting and warmer in a cold office, and the only remaining objection is a vague feeling that vests are something other men wear. The Vest Is the Obvious Choice
That feeling is the same one that kept men out of briefs for thirty years, and it has the same answer. Wear the better thing, wear it correctly, tell nobody, and let the results make the argument. Briefs for the Office: The Tailoring Argument