What's in a white tee?

On learning that the moments make the magic

I must’ve been twelve years old, with a very limited concept of what college applications even were, when someone told me their sister had applied and been accepted to a prestigious university after completing the following prompt and the following prompt only: describe yourself in one sentence.

Describing yourself in one sentence, to a group of people whose very job it is to judge you, feels nigh-on impossible, even to the less verbose among us (I would assume. I am not one of them). How does one distill their entire essence into a single sentence? I can’t imagine the first sentence that came to me—she came, she saw, she wouldn’t shut up—would draw the admiration of a professional admissions committee.

As someone who views getting dressed not as a practical concern but instead a daily act of creative expression that cut through the monotony of everyday life, it took me a while to figure out how I could wear a white t-shirt in ways that felt sufficiently interesting. It felt like the sartorial equivalent of that college application; the most elemental expression of style humanly possible. But once you realize a white t-shirt is a blank canvas and tap into their endless, timeless potential…you, like me, may become hyper-fixated on finding the right one.

My first foray into the wonderful world of white t-shirts didn’t come about until quarter-life. I was twenty-five when I left my job at Harper’s BAZAAR for a different industry where I made (just) enough money to buy clothes (as I’ve mentioned, my publishing industry income, plus two side hustles, covered rent, baked beans, and frequent subway trips to my parents’ apartment for free food).

Age twenty-five was also the first time in my adult life I was properly single, having been in a relationship from the age of 19, which was long-distance in its very drawn-out final years. That, of course, meant that if there was anything remaining in the coffers, it went towards the Megabus. If you know, you know. If you don’t, congratulations on choosing a more lucrative career path (sorry, I have to tell you: between 2015 and 2017, a 6-hour bus ride cost $6).

I think about that post-breakup period of my life all the time, always fondly. It felt like the beginning and end of my youth as I knew it, in the best possible way. I met my now-husband less than two years later. But before that, during the frenzied period from July 2017 through early 2019, when I lived with one of my best friends and next door to two of our other best friends, all but one of us single, just important enough at our jobs to be able to complain about it over glasses of wine but not so valuable that we couldn’t stay out late drinking on weeknights, was a blank canvas, indeed.

I don’t think I’m alone among thirty-somethings looking back on their twenties and wondering how we did it with an intense mix of nostalgia and relief. How did we go out every single night? How did we subsist on iced lattes and sugary scones? How did we not get dejected or exhausted after date after date after date? I was too young and naïve to understand the importance of seeking out grounding rituals, but subconsciously, it must’ve been the chaotic, halcyon swirl of those days that compelled me towards a simple wardrobe formula; that one-sentence expression. I wore it every weekend, I wore it on first dates, I wore it to lunch, to dinner, and everywhere but work because my office was a bit more formal at the time: white t-shirt, kick-flare jeans, hint of a bralette peeking out beneath, and a sneaker. Or maybe it wasn’t that deep, (was anything, back then? Life was so much simpler before we had to intellectualize it all on Substack) and I was just subconsciously copying Caroline, who often wore a great white t-shirt with jeans and sneakers.

It was during this period that my sister was studying abroad in Australia, and I went to visit her. When I had studied abroad in Cape Town, I attended class a grand total of, and I do mean this, four times, so I wasn’t familiar with the concept of someone taking their semester away’s academic courses seriously (there are no six words in the English language more comforting to a lazy college student than “it doesn’t count towards your GPA”). I assumed my sister and I would be hanging out all day long, so imagine my surprise when I found full swathes of the day free and open, because she “had to attend class.”

My preferred means of getting to know a city is not exploring the local tourist attractions, but attempting to spend the day like I would if I lived there—coffee shop, workout, shop, dinner. So, I acquainted myself with a local yoga studio (Humming Puppy, for inquiring minds), and then decided to for a quick stroll around Surry Hills, a leafy suburb that housed a (now permanently closed😭) clothing store I wandered into called NIQUE. They sold gorgeous basics, in particular—you guessed it—white t-shirts. I bought four to replace the ones I’d been wearing, which I’d pilfered from my mom’s closet, a major investment for me at the time; they weren’t cheap, somewhere between $40 and $60 USD each. And, of course, I wore them non-stop.

They were, in my opinion, the perfect white t-shirt: French linen (made from flax fibers for that “rougher” look), loose but not comically wide sleeves, structured boatneck, and the level of sheer I wanted at that time (remember what I said about the bralette? OH, YOUTH). It also tucked perfectly into a jean…it was, simply put, the perfect white t-shirt.

THEEEEEEE TEE. The three other ones are in the bag, lol

All good things come to an end, though, so I did, of course, have to discard these t-shirts four or five years after initial purchase; I wore them a LOT, and they wore down quickly. I haven’t been able to recapture the their magic yet, but, over the past week, I decided to wear all of my other white t-shirts, to find elements I loved of each of them, in attempt to Frankenstein the perfect search query, and find the perfect shirt to replace my long lost NIQUE numbers. But it wasn’t long before I realized that the shirt itself possessed no magic powers. It was the era in which I wore it that did.

I’ve had many versions of a white t-shirt since: the brown leather jacket I wore every day on a perfect trip to London with my best friends, last summer that felt like another final, gorgeous gasp of youth before we prepare for the second act of our lives to begin. The red, ribbed shirt I wore on every single date I went on in 2019; save for September 19th, 2019, a day I decided to do something different, and wear a navy boatneck to meet the man I ended up marrying. There’s the all-white ensemble that caught the attention of a new colleague who became my work BFF (hi Talia <3). And so, so many more.

I might never find “the perfect” white t-shirt, or wear an all-white ensemble ever again, but, in the moments when I’m stressed out about whether my outfit effectively communicates who I am, I can think back on these times and remember it’s not what I was wearing, but the moments I wore them in, that truly mattered.

But seriously guys, if you have perfect white t-shirt recs, let me know.