Men's white shirts have become scarce as pandemic restrictions lift and weddings go ahead and people return to the office.Steve Cukrov/Getty Images/iStockphoto
The salesman gestures at a wall of brightly coloured spring suits – one a muted pink, another baby blue – and says they’ve never been this popular.
After two years of being locked down and snowed in and sweatpanted up, men, it seems, are ready for a little flair.
But that’s not the most telling detail to be learned during a visit to this Tip Top store in Toronto’s Dufferin Mall.
For that, you have to wait for the salesman to gesture to a display table featuring about a dozen shirt-and-tie combinations.
“Tell me what you don’t see,” he says. After a moment of confused silence, the salesman answers his own question. “I have no white shirts.”
Lance Itkoff, president and CEO of Grafton Apparel, which owns Tip Top Tailors, confirms that white-shirt scarcity is a national phenomenon.
“Thirty-five years [in the industry], I’ve never seen sales like this,” he says.
Of all the items that flew off store shelves during the pandemic, each has served as a window into where we are in the pandemic: Toilet paper when we were at our most anxious. Flour for sourdough bread when we most needed the reassuring comforts of home. Outdoor gear when cabin fever became too much to bear. Now, the soaring demand for white shirts points to how eagerly many of us are shooting back toward so-called normal. With restrictions lifted, every wedding that’s been on hold and every celebration of life that’s been waiting to happen are crowding the calendar, along with graduation ceremonies and people returning to the office – making the white Oxford shirt, the one thing a man can reliably wear to any event or occasion, the most sought-after item of the Great Reopening of 2022.
“We probably have over 10,000 units in just white shirts flowing to the stores this week, it’s just so hard to keep up with demand,” Mr. Itkoff said over the phone last week.
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Usually, people who work in men’s wear aren’t cheering about white shirts, but these are hardly usual times.
In the first full week of April, sales of white shirts were up 274 per cent over the same period in the pre-pandemic days of 2019, Mr. Itkoff said.
“Every Monday we have a merchant meeting with our regionals across the country, and every week it’s like, ‘When are the white shirts arriving?’” says Tiffany Braund, vice-president of merchandising for Tip Top.
A vendor recently sent the team a picture of white shirts arriving in a warehouse, ready for distribution. “We were all like, ‘The white shirts are here, everybody!’” Ms. Braund says.
The resurgence of weddings is the biggest factor driving demand for white shirts, Mr. Itkoff says, adding that also, “return to office for us is very strong.”
A survey conducted by The Knot, a U.S.-based wedding planning company, found that there will be more weddings south of the border this year than any year since 1984. An estimated 2.6 million weddings are expected to take place this year, up from 2.2 million in 2019, according to the company.
Harry Rosen stores across Canada are well stocked on white shirts, but only because there was such a surge in demand last spring when restrictions partially lifted that it convinced the company to stock up on basics in anticipation of another reopening this spring.
“We were caught a little bit flat-footed,” says Ian Rosen, president and chief operating officer of Harry Rosen. “We sat down at the end of the last spring and into the fall and said, okay, we need to make sure we’re ready.”
Supply chain issues are making it harder than ever to meet demand, says Anita D’Abbondanza, owner of Shirt Fit Inc., a Toronto-based shirt maker. Shutdowns overseas have choked the supply of yarn from China, she says. “It’s hard for people to get inventory into the store.”
Something that would typically take 45 days to go from factory to warehouse now takes upwards of 80 days to arrive, Mr. Itkoff says.
And while white shirts may be the hottest item at the moment, overall men seem eager to take a break from casual dress. Maybe it’s all that time at home in sweatpants.
“We’re basically running double the amount of units that we’re selling in suits to the comparable pre-pandemic number where we thought we were doing a good job,” Mr. Itkoff says.
If you’ve got a wedding coming up, or think an invitation might be coming down the road, now is probably the time to put in an order for a white shirt.
“We’re projecting this surge to last well into next year,” Mr. Itkoff says.
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