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 Vest Is the Obvious Choice
Should men wear vests? One protects shirts you paid real money for, adds warmth without bulk and costs little. The case for the undershirt, and the film myth.
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There is a garment that costs about the price of two coffees, makes your shirts last years longer, keeps you warmer in winter without adding a millimetre of bulk, keeps you drier in summer, and is completely invisible when worn properly. Almost every well dressed man over sixty owns several. Almost every man under forty has decided, without ever testing the proposition, that it is somehow embarrassing.
The vest is the best value garment in menswear and it is not remotely close.
What it actually does
It saves your shirts. This is the argument that converts people, because it is measured in money. Sweat, body oil and aluminium-based deodorant are what destroy shirts: the yellow staining at the underarm, the grey shadow at the collar, the fabric going thin and hard where it sits against skin. A vest intercepts every bit of that. You wash a cheap vest to destruction instead of an expensive shirt, which is the entire trade and it is a very good one.
It keeps you cooler, not hotter. The common objection is that an extra layer must be warmer, and in summer the opposite is true. A fitted vest in cotton or merino lifts the shirt off your skin and moves moisture into a layer that can carry it, so the shirt stays dry and dry cloth against skin is what comfortable feels like. Anyone who has worn a soaked shirt directly against their back on a train in July has run the experiment already. The Sweat Article: Moisture-Wicking Fabrics, Explained Properly
It keeps you warmer, without bulk. In winter the same garment does the opposite job, adding a genuine layer of warmth under a shirt or jumper while remaining completely invisible under tailoring. The Winter Base Layer: How to Be Warm Without Looking Like a Bin Bag
It is comfortable. It stops scratchy knitwear meeting skin, stops a stiff shirt front rubbing, and gives the torso a clean line under close-fitting shirts.
Four benefits, no visible cost, roughly the price of a sandwich. There is no other purchase in your wardrobe with that ratio.
The film that supposedly killed it
Every discussion of the vest eventually produces the story: Clark Gable removes his shirt in It Happened One Night in 1934, reveals no undershirt underneath, and American undershirt sales collapse overnight, by some enormous percentage, ruining an industry.
It is a wonderful story and it does not really hold up. The figure changes every time it is told, no contemporary sales data has ever been produced to support it, and the studio itself is a likelier source of the legend than any accountant. Treat it as folklore, which is what it is.
The real damage came much later, and it came from language. In America the sleeveless vest acquired a slang name in the 1990s so unpleasant that we will not print it here, one that attached an image of domestic violence to a piece of cotton. In Britain and Ireland the string vest picked up its own class caricature through decades of television comedy. Neither of those is an argument about a garment. Both did more to empty the category than any film ever managed. The Case for Briefs: Why They Should Be Every Man's Default
Where the word comes from
The vest is what remained when the Victorian union suit, a one piece garment covering the whole body, was sensibly cut in half. The top half became the vest in British English and the undershirt in American English. "Tank top" arrived by a different route: swimming pools were once called tanks, the swimsuits worn in them were tank suits, and the sleeveless shape kept the name after it climbed out of the water.
The sleeveless athletic version, the A-shirt, is short for athletic shirt, because it was sportswear before it was anything else. Every garment on this blog seems to have started in sport, and none of that is a coincidence. Right Support, Right Sport: What to Wear for What You Do
Who is already wearing one
Almost everyone you would take advice from. Italian and French men across every age group, for whom the canottiera and the maillot de corps never stopped being normal. Japanese men, in some of the best cotton knitwear made anywhere. Indian men, where the vest and the brief are sold together as the basic pairing and always have been. Anyone who works outdoors in winter. Anyone who owns shirts they cannot afford to replace. Where the World Wears Briefs: An Atlas
Buying your first one
Fitted, not baggy. It should skim the torso, because a loose vest bunches under a shirt and does none of the moisture work it was bought for.
Skin tone or light grey, not white, if it is going under a white or pale shirt. A white vest is the most visible colour under a white shirt, which is one of the great counterintuitive facts of dressing. The Undershirt Under a Dress Shirt: Six Rules
Fine cotton or merino, and buy three. fine cotton vest ยท merino vest Which three depends on whether you want it under a suit, under a jumper or on its own in July, because the makers who are good at one of those are rarely the best at the others. The Best Vests and Undershirts You Can Actually Buy
Wear them for a fortnight, then look at your shirt collars. That is the whole argument, and it wins on the evidence like everything else here does. A Field Guide to Vests: Singlet to Base Layer
Questions people ask
What is the point of wearing a vest under a shirt?
It takes the sweat before your shirt does, which keeps collars and underarms clean, makes shirts last years longer and removes the anxiety of raising your arms in a pale shirt. It also stops a shirt sticking to your back in the heat, and it adds a layer of warmth in a cold office at no visible cost. Shirts are expensive; vests are not.
Will a vest make me hotter in summer?
A fine cotton or merino vest usually makes you feel cooler, because it moves moisture off the skin and stops a shirt clinging. The vests that make people hot are thick, cheap and synthetic. Weight and fibre decide this, not the number of layers.
What colour vest goes under a white shirt?
Skin tone or a light grey, never white. A white vest is the single most visible colour under a white shirt, which catches out almost everybody the first time, and a shade close to your own skin disappears completely. The Undershirt Under a Dress Shirt: Six Rules