Who wears a dress shirt working in a steel mill, though?
Only if it is really cold.
I choose shirts with close attention to the sheerness of the fabric. Cheap, crappy shirts look like a napkin after an Egg McMuffin sat on it for ten minutes. Quality shirts are worth the investment, especially if you wear them every day. So, I just don’t see the point of wearing an undershirt.
I never wear an undershirt, don’t even own one and not sure what they’re for.
I suppose maybe if I were sweatier.
Suits are too darned hot in the first place – especially those three-piece suits I wore back in the 70s and 80s. I’m always waiting for an opportunity to take off the jacket. The last thing I want is another layer of clothing.
Traditionally, you always wear an undershirt, white or light gray, the style was up to you. At the bank I worked at, we were full-on business attire until the new Millenium. Men wore jackets and ties to work, and while you could remove the jacket while in your own work area, when leaving for lunch or going to another department, you had your jacket on. In that environment, if you didn’t wear an undershirt and your boss spotted it, he’d have a word with you.
I never wear undershirts and haven’t since about 1960.
And I read stories that managers at IBM in the 1960s would perform garter checks by pulling up men’s pant legs to ensure that their socks were secured in the right manner. Such behavior has everything to do with busybodies doing what they do, and nothing to do with sartorial correctness.
I dress fairly formally every day for my work and deal with people similarly dressed every single day. I’d say overwhelmingly everyone wears an undershirt, some wear v-necks so that might leave some small bare chest showing if they are going a little less formal and have no tie and their collar unbuttoned but even then they do have an undershirt.
I think the primary reason is a lot of nicer dress shirts are made of light fabrics that can be see through in the right circumstances sand it’s basically the opposite of formal to have your torso visible through your clothing. For heavier dress shirts (probably any that you’d buy at a place like Kohl’s or JC Penney) I doubt that would ever be a problem.
Always wear an undershirt. Even here in hot, humid Thailand I am much more comfortable wearing an undershirt under my dress shirt. If I try wearing just a dress shirt with no undershirt, my dress shirt will be a damp, clingy, clammy mess and I’ll be miserable all day.
To all those who don’t wear an undershirt - you may not think you perspire and produce noticeable odor, but other might disagree. An undershirt is protection against offending others.
:rolleyes:
I don’t often wear a suit anymore, though it was my daily work attire from the late 1980s through the mid 1990s, which is when an awful lot of companies in the U.S. went from “business attire” to “business casual”. I still wear dress shirts semi-regularly, though I’m often wearing them with khakis rather than a suit.
Anyway, yes, I always wear an undershirt when wearing a dress shirt, even in the summertime. The reasoning is simple: I’m a fairly prodigious perspirer, and light-colored shirts which I wear tend to show the effects of this in the underarms over time. It’s cheaper to get new undershirts regularly than new dress shirts, especially when I first started wearing suits and dress shirts, in an era when anything other than a white or light blue dress shirt was considered to pretty out-there in an office environment.
Today, even though a lot of my dress shirts are darker-colored, I still wear undershirts beneath them. Part force of habit, part preferring the feel.
It might be a corporate culture/generational thing. Some of the recent hires and most the older guys here wear undershirts.
In my attempt to stay young at heart my torso goes commando 
I haven’t dressed formally since I retired from the Navy ten years ago. I find it difficult to imagine ever doing it again. But I always wear an undershirt.
When I wear a button shirt, I wear an undershirt. If it’s a polo shirt, then, I don’t.
You have to wear a white undershirt with a dress shirt. Dress shirts are often slightly translucent. You don’t want your chest to be showing through.
And also, yes, it protects your dress shirt from armpit sweat.
I have worn a full suit and tie for about the last 20 years of my working life and have never worn one unless it was around freezing. I don’t get it, they are a hangover from when shirts were expensive and hard to launder.
I wear a suit and tie to work every day and have only ever put on an undershirt when it was bloody cold, otherwise no.
My work shirts are a cotton poly blend with enough cotton that I can breathe through them.
I can be a reasonable sweater, but wearing an undershirt makes that worse not better.
And yeah, some people have spotted tatts through the white business shirts, so what?
Never. I buy good custom shirts, and they are not sheer. I do not sweat profusely so I am not prone to pitstains. I am also far more comfortable in very cold weather, so the idea of packing on an extra layer holds no appeal. Sweat really only damages my cuffs and collars, which are easy to replace and no undershirt can mitigate that.
I’m a hairy beast, and I’ve never had a problem with it showing through even white shirts.
Yep I wear good quality shirts that are not see through.