Just as the retro nerd glasses are back in fashion, the short-sleeved shirts are returning to the daily fashion. Young and stylish menswear designers - Marc Jacobs, Thom Browne, Scott Sternberg of Band of Outsiders, Alexander McQueen, Michael Bastian - all see sport-cut shirts with short sleeves as an essential part of men's wardrobe in the summer of 2006. "I think they look really great again," Bastian says. "It fits with the trendy variation on the '60s - high school graduation style." Think of Dastin Hoffman's Benjamin Braddock in the 1967 movie The Graduate.
Last summer, Steven Klein filmed a session for W magazine with Brad Pitt wearing this shirt as the father of a large family. As Pitt has shown, all of these student clothes look much better if the body is in good shape and the cut is tailored to the figure. The designers also tried to raise the "sexy degree" of the shirt. Previously, the sleeves were just short versions of the long ones - big and baggy, so that even the pumped up muscles looked sluggish in them. Sternberg and other designers have balanced the arms and torso for a more form-fitting shape.
