The Best Men's Dress Shirts Will Earn You That Promotion

According to GQ senior commerce editor Avidan Grossman, the Bowery shirt’s distinguishing factor is also its most subtle: a perfect middle-of-the-road point collar. “I could blather on about fit and fabric, but that collar is the real deal,” he notes. “You know how hard it is to find a dress shirt for less than a hundred bucks without a pipsqueak-y semi-spread or a garish cutaway?” Much to his endless chagrin, Grossman does—and he says it’s not worth trying to locate a better alternative for the price. He’s pointed (heh) countless friends in the shirt’s direction, and won’t stop recommending it any time soon. “If anyone from J.Crew reads this,” he told us half-jokingly (we think), he wants “to start working on commission.”

Best Men’s Dress Shirt on Amazon: Calvin Klein Slim Fit Non-Iron Dress Shirt

Fit: Slim | Material: 96% Cotton, 4% Spandex | Collar: Point | Cuffs: Single button | Size Availability: 14”-18.5” neck; 32”-37” sleeve

Got a last-minute invite to a swanky event and need a dress shirt ASAP? Not to fear, Amazon is here (and there, and pretty much everywhere). Calvin Klein’s no-frills slim fit shirt is cut from high-quality cotton that’s just a tad more stretchy than our overall pick, and comes equipped with plenty of next-gen specs its counterparts eschew—including moisture-wicking properties to keep you cool and a non-iron coating to keep it looking crisp. (You’re short on time, right?) Mercifully, the added spandex offers a little give without making the shirt look too shiny. Throw it over your finest chinos or the dress pants you impulsively splurged on or wear it with jeans on a relaxed Friday in the office. Even if you bought it at the eleventh hour, it won’t take long for it to supplant the pricier competition.

Best Upgrade Men’s Dress Shirt: Todd Snyder x Hamilton Long Point Collar Shirt

Fit: Classic | Material: Cotton | Collar: Point | Cuffs: Single button | Size Availability: 14.5-18

When Todd Snyder called up the storied American shirting specialists at Hamilton, he probably didn’t know they were about to concoct an instant classic. Hand-cut and -sewn in Hamilton’s Houston-based workshop, the dress shirt they landed on is structured but not suffocating, formal but not foppish, and vintage-inspired without veering into cosplay. (The elegant point collar and mother of pearl buttons don’t hurt.) What else did you expect from a centuries-old Texas operation that might’ve been the Lone Star state’s best export until Beyoncé came along? Hamilton has been making shirts like this since 1883, and we have a nagging suspicion it’ll still be on this list in 2083, too.

When Todd Snyder debuted his swashbuckling Wythe suit last fall, we were quick to herald the style’s louche, ‘80s-indebted silhouette as a seismic shift in the tailoring market. All the Wythe needed, of course, was a shirt to go along with it—and a few months later, Hamilton cooked up exactly that. Its extended retro-inspired point collar syncs up seamlessly with the Wythe’s brash peak labels and gently-structured shoulders, Grossman notes, a coup for anyone chasing vintage Armani vibes at a slightly more palatable budget. Grossman wears his own religiously, with just about everything in his closet: an inherited paisley necktie and jeans, a plain white tee and fraying double-knees, a chalky double-breasted suit he scored on eBay. “I own way too many dress shirts,” Grossman says. “This is the one I wear most—and it ain’t even close.”

Best Splurge-Worthy Men’s Dress Shirt: Charvet Double-Cuff Shirt

Fit: Slim-fit | Material: Cotton | Collar: Spread | Cuffs: French | Size Availability: 38-44 EU

When you’re rolling with the movers and shakers of the world, you need a dress shirt that can keep up. And that’s exactly what the vaunted Parisian chemise-makers at Charvet specialize in, to the delight of royalty both literal (countless French kings) and cultural (Sofia Coppola is a well-known fan). This breezy cotton number is no exception: It’s cut on the looser side and features an extremely classy double cuff for when you're ready to break out the cufflinks you inherited from your old man. Even with the tres formale flourishes, though, we wouldn't shy away from rocking it in a more casual context. When you slip on this sucker, you don’t need to meet with the boss—you are the boss.

“Charvet does not fuck around,” Grossman says bluntly. There’s no shortage of reasons why it remains the first name in old-world dress shirts—and its centuries of pedigree barely cracks the top five. Sure, the brand has outfitted kings, presidents, and titans of industry in equal number, but its core value proposition comes down to one exceedingly simple principle: uncompromising quality. Every dress shirt is still made by hand in Charvet’s wood-paneled Parisian townhouse, which is worth the cost of a flight to visit, Grossman notes. If you’re not quite ready to drop half a grand on a dress shirt your grandkids will fight over, he also recommends a more wallet-friendly hack: These days, Charvet’s shirts are all over the vintage market, and “you can reliably score one for a lot less than retail”.

Best Budget Men’s Dress Shirt: Uniqlo Dress Non-Iron Shirt

Fit: Slim | Material: 100% cotton, 80 count double-ply thread | Collar: Spread | Cuffs: Single button | Size Availability: XS-3XL

If it comes as any surprise that Uniqlo sells one of the best bang-for-your-buck dress shirts on the market, you’re likely new to GQ Recommends—and the Japanese retailer’s assortment of eminently affordable menswear staples. Unlike its Calvin Klein counterpart, Uniqlo’s riff on the genre isn’t available with the added benefit of Prime shipping, but what you get instead is a dress shirt that’s worth exponentially more than what you pay for.

GQ style commerce writer Gerald Ortiz wears Uniqlo’s reliably elegant button-ups even when he’s not in a bind. “From the fit to the construction,” he notes, “it’s hard to imagine a better shirt for the price.” Unlike many of its counterparts in the same price bracket, Uniqlo’s dress shirt is made from 100% long-staple cotton with nary a hint of stretch in sight. (The added elastane might promise some degree of extra comfort, but Ortiz finds it superfluous if the shirt fits like it should.) Per Ortiz, the fabric is specially treated for wrinkle resistance, a boon for the more careless among us that, unfortunately, also lends it a visible sheen he could do without. But the details redeem it completely: no sloppy stitching, exposed seams, or wimpy collars here. Perhaps most crucially, the slim fit isn’t so svelte that you’ll look like you got dressed in 2010.

As with any garment, “good” is subjective—but as a general rule of thumb, it comes down to three crucial factors: fabric, construction, and fit. The majority of good dress shirts eschew synthetic materials in favor of natural long-staple cotton, woven tightly for extra durability. Cotton, of course, is not a prerequisite—but almost every single great dress shirt we’ve swaddled our torsos in has been made from some riff on the fabric, from poplin to pinpoint Oxford cloth. Another reliable indicator of quality? Telltale details like French or felled seams, which are sleeker and more durable; mother of pearl buttons; and a denser or finer stitch count, usually commensurate with the amount of craftsmanship involved.

As any menswear wonk will tell you, dress shirts boast no shortage of nuances. So in the name of brevity (and general wonk-avoidance), we compiled a handy-dandy glossary to the terms you’ll encounter most often. As a rule of thumb, the less adornment a dress shirt has, the more formal it is.

Like all of menswear, collars are susceptible to the whims of the trend cycle, swelling and shrinking with any given era’s silhouettes du jour. Collar sizes are prone to change, too (see: the massive collars of the power-suited ‘80s; the ultra-shrunken collars of the indie-sleaze 2010s). These are the three you should know.

• The Point Collar: Point collars feature a narrower spread than other collar styles, stopping just short of the lapels on a suit jacket.
• The Spread Collar: Spread collars spread outward at a wider angle than a point collar, usually 90 degrees or more, extending to meet the lapels of a suit jacket.
• The Button-Down Collar: Button-down collars feature—wait for it—button holes at their corners that keep them attached to the shirt. Originally prized by British polo players for practical reasons (it’s windy out there), they were popularized stateside by Brooks Brothers and eventually immortalized in the prep canon.

Cuffs are the small pieces of additional fabric at the end of the shirt sleeve; they're often constructed with stiffer linings to give them structure and thoroughly cover your wrists. These are the two you should know.

• The Barrel Cuff: Barrel cuffs are more common, and feature fabric that overlaps and forms a cylinder at the wrist, held in place by buttons.
• The French Cuff: French cuffs are more formal, and feature an extended piece of fabric designed to be folded over and held in place by cufflinks.

Plackets are the strip of fabric that runs down the front of the shirt, designed to be fastened with buttons, snaps, or zippers. (When it comes to dress shirts, you’ll almost always encounter the former.) These are the three you should know.

• Front Placket: Front plackets are the most common, and feature fabric that’s been folded back, occasionally with an added interlining for more structure.
• French Placket: French plackets are flat plackets that haven’t been folded back, yielding a cleaner shirt front.
• Hidden Placket: Hidden plackets are constructed in such a way that the fabric actually covers the buttons, leaving a totally unadorned front. They're typically considered the dressiest of the three, and make for a great black tie option because of it.

To kick off the process, we enlisted a who's who of GQ staffers to wear-test our contenders. Some of our colleagues have worked in retail; others have toiled for small-batch labels; all spend objectively too much time thinking about shirts. We leaned on that collective experience to guide our search, culling a mix of household names, indie favorites, and the artisanal imprints on the bleeding-edge of the genre. Then we narrowed down the assortment to the picks that scored the highest across quality, fit, and price.

Our testers owned some of the shirts on this list already, but a whole bunch were totally new to us. So after wear-testing the entire crop, we recorded our deeply scientific observations and rejiggered our selections accordingly. Based on those evaluations, we ran the numbers, collated the anecdotal evidence, and emerged with a list of what we believe to be the absolute best dress shirts for men right now, from the tried-and-true stalwarts to the modern disruptors, the affordable beaters to the wildly expensive (but wildly worth-it) designer riffs. Whatever your preferences, whatever your style, there's bound to be a shirt here for you. (Read more about GQ's testing process here.)

• Gerald Ortiz, GQ Style Commerce Writer
• Michael Nolledo, GQ Associate Commerce Director
• Reed Nelson, GQ Contributor
• Avidan Grossman, GQ Senior Commerce Editor