dress to impress
Need to look sharp? Finding a girl’s Oxford shirt is trickier than you’d imagine. element’s Polina Pushkina navigates through the city’s best options.
TEXT POLINA PUSHKINA feedback
Moscow fashionistas have long learned to live with the fact that finding decent shoes and jeans for a normal price in Moscow is simply impossible. Now life has thrown a new challenge — finding the nice shirt to go with them. I see you smiling. Now think when the last time was that you managed to find a non-baggy item with long enough sleeves, a normal looking collar and a hint of a waist line, made in a cotton material that doesn’t shrink in the wash. Your next thought: Why do I care? Because even if you are not an office worker, a stylish shirt is known to have quite the seductive effect over feis kontrol. First thing you need to do is forget places like Mango, Zara and others of the same category. I know, getting your true love out of your mind is not easy, but their shirts simply do not fit. The only non-expensive spot that is worth checking out is Company’s which offers the right white shirts. At the moment even this office-look oriented shop is overloaded with Christmas-y options that are decorated with shiny stones. But harass the shop assistant. She’ll lead you to the treasures hidden in the back like a plain white Jack Pot shirt with cropped sleeves (1,650 rubles). A nice fit and a nice price in one. Failure in this democratically-priced shop means only one thing — it is time to take a more serious budget and look at more serious shops that for ages have been focusing on making shirts only. Dutch Van Laack has an excellent reputation with men, which is a good enough reason to give it a try. Girls’ shirts here run from 7,000 to 12,000 rubles and are made of the finest possible cotton, which requires almost no ironing. If you are aiming for something more feminine, try blouses that are made of silk or with the additional material of silk fiber. Van Laack deserves more points for the shop assistant’s honesty. If a shirt’s tender lilac shade makes you look like a dead ballerina, she’ll say so. For more creative solutions in the same price range, I suggest stopping at the new Etro boutique in GUM shopping center. When you try on one of their exotically colored shirts, you almost can feel hundreds of years of Italian tailors’ experience absorbed by this particular item. Etro shirts start from about 8,000 rubles and boast perfect proportions: shoulders that fit you as if the shirt was tailored for you personally and a length — not too long and not too short — that guarantees to perfectly match your jeans. For a classic look choose striped variants. A party in a cool club might require Etro’s trade-mark paisley, while white shirts with pink or green knitted ornaments look like smart date solutions. | 
