This holiday season you can’t swing a broker on Bay St. without hitting a guy in a lavender shirt.
One recent, albeit informal, survey (by a male friend, of course) in the locker-room at the Adelaide Club at First Canadian Place revealed pale purple shirts on 6 out of 8 hooks in the change room.
“We’ve had a huge run on purple,” says Melissa Austria, owner of Gotstyle. “It is regal, and it is more accessible than pink.”
Indeed, pink is so three years ago, says Austria, and men’s magazines are pushing it as a basic shirt colour now. That said, magazines and fashion shows are less influential in the bulge of the conservative business attire market. “Young men are dressing like gay men these days,” says Wendy Natale, the fashion editor at Hello Canada and principal of On Your Behalf, a personal shopping service that specializes in swanking up men. “They are embracing colour and flamboyance. The young guns are forcing their fathers to keep up.”
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With the larger trend of going tieless, especially at night, Austria has sold a slew of purple pocket squares to go with purple shirts: “It looks naked with nothing at the neck if you don’t toss on a square.”