Unlock the Secret to a Total Lifestyle Reset: How to Wipe Your Slate Clean and Transform Your Health Forever

Ever find yourself staring blankly into your closet, heart racing like it’s the last rep of your deadlift, wondering how the heck you’re supposed to dress when everything else feels like it’s falling apart? Yeah, been there – trust me. A few years back, amid the chaos of a messy breakup and a soul-sucking job, I couldn’t piece together an outfit to save my life. My room lacked a window, and so did my motivation. Yet somehow, I kept reaching for this plain, oversized white men’s shirt. Not because it was flashy or new but because it was simple—a sartorial lifeline when my brain was fried. It became my armor and my fresh slate, kind of like that go-to vanilla protein shake: plain on the surface but endlessly versatile, and always there when you need it most. Funny how the humblest things help you find your focus, right? Well, turns out this classic white button-up isn’t just a staple—it’s a symbol of order in the madness, showing up everywhere from fall runways to music videos, ready to be worn, twisted, and broken in, just like life itself. Intrigued? Dive into how this unassuming piece keeps winning the style game—and maybe your sanity—every single day. LEARN MORE

A few years ago, I could not put an outfit together to save my life. I was going through a messy breakup and feeling stagnant at my job. I was sleeping in a bedroom without a window. Everything felt overwhelming, including getting dressed. I had pieces I loved shoved into my tiny closet; there was a printed Jean Paul Gaultier sheer shirt, a cheeky bedazzled souvenir top from Paris, and a bubblegum-pink vintage knit. But I found myself gravitating toward a plain white men’s shirt. I wore the same look several times a week: this slightly oversize, slightly rumpled men’s button-up with a pair of jeans and ballet flats. I wasted no precious brainpower riffling through my closet.

The shirt was a balm and a blank slate. It felt dressier than a white tee but also profound in its sartorial possibilities. Some like it crisp, but I prefer it a little beat-up. A lived-in white shirt can last the whole day and stand up to whatever I throw at it (literally and figuratively).

My mom, an antiques dealer and fashion lover, likens the shirt to vanilla ice cream—which is not to say that it’s bland but rather that it’s a classic you can rely on and return to. “The white shirt keeps things clean,” she says. Sure, there might be a zillion other flavors in the ice cream shop, but the white shirt is a palate—and palette—cleanser.

Lately, I’ve found myself needing the white shirt once again. My life is in chaos, though it’s a happier chaos this time, as I care for a new baby and am building my own business. I’ve also noticed the button-up swirling in the zeitgeist. I was transfixed by Lorde, who wore a cool, carefree version in the music video for “What Was That.” She was dressed down, with her Balenciaga jeans barely hanging onto her hips and duct tape lazily wrapped around her lug-sole boots. Her white shirt was barely buttoned and, depending on how the wind blew, would flutter upward to reveal a swath of midriff. How sensual. How simple.

From left: Givenchy, Comission, Keisukeyoshida.

The white button-up was all over the Fall 2025 runways too. While the Row went classic, at Balenciaga the white shirt was stretched and elongated, made into a minidress with a wickedly upturned collar. Prada showcased a version featuring romantic, sloping plackets and puffed sleeves, with a slight rumple in the fabric. There were funkier iterations, like at Issey Miyake, where the collar was skewed to the side of the body, as if someone had flicked it, like the world tilted off its axis. The Japanese designer Keisuke Yoshida applied descending knots crisscrossing across the buttons like a straitjacket. Thakoon Panichgul of babe-basics label HommeGirls released a shirt that is reminiscent of a Japanese school uniform, homing in on its boxiness.

Thom Browne has built his whole enterprise on the idea of the uniform. The white oxford shirt (a heavier, stiffer version of a button-up made from oxford cloth) was one of the first items he introduced when he launched his label in 2001, and he continues to show iterations season after season. “I wanted it to be something that when you thought of my collection, you thought of that white oxford, but it wasn’t just a white shirt,” he says. “It was also the idea of that bulletproof cotton shirt that I think we all grew up wearing.”

There’s that democratic word we. The white button-up is all for one and one for all. Browne’s mother dressed him in charming Brooks Brothers shirts as a child. I grew up wearing a stiff style for chorus and job interviews. The white shirt has long conferred a sense of professionalism. The term “white-collar” dates back to 1910 but was popularized by the author Upton Sinclair, who used it to refer to someone who manned a desk job in The Brass Check, his 1919 exposé of American journalism.

From left: Prada, Undercover, Dior.

The white shirt is a standard item of clothing, but it’s also an iconoclast. Who can forget when Carrie Bradshaw put on Big’s oversize white shirt and belted it after falling into the Central Park lake? Uma Thurman’s character in Pulp Fiction, Mia Wallace, wore one; she was poised and bitchy with a cigarette in her hand, her dagger-sharp cuffs with a juicy black enamel cuff link on full display. Carolyn Bessette Kennedy and Princess Diana, whose style is revered as much today as it ever was, both used white shirts to communicate easy elegance. Designer Carolina Herrera did the same. Her pairing of a long evening skirt and tucked-in, half-unbuttoned white shirt became a blueprint for red-carpet dressing. In 1998, Sharon Stone attended the Oscars in a Herrera-esque look: a sheeny lavender silk skirt by Vera Wang with a Gap men’s shirt unbuttoned down to the navel, the collar slightly flipped upward, the plackets spread open. At this year’s Met Gala, Anne Hathaway wore a Carolina Herrera skirt and white button-up with a stiff popped collar, which she later wore to an after-party with black pants. Talk about the easiest outfit change ever.

In May of last year, Hathaway wore a tailored shirtdress designed by Gap Inc. creative director Zac Posen. The piece had a throw-on-and-go appeal: Hathaway’s stylist Erin Walsh gave it a tug, and the collar of the white shirtdress was positioned to slope off of the actress’s bare shoulder. “The Gap white shirt is crisp, classic, and effortlessly above trends,” Posen explains. “There’s something undeniably timeless about its simplicity.” When Gap first released a version of Hathaway’s look on its website, the dress sold out within six hours.

From left: Hodakova, Issey Miyake, the Row, Ralph Lauren.

One of the best white shirts I’ve come across recently is from the beloved independent brand Chava Studio by Olivia Villanti. According to Villanti, who is based in Mexico City, women’s white shirts typically have a lighter, more flimsy collar and cuff, while men’s shirting has that satisfying crunch that gives it structure. I tell Villanti that the clavicle has long been a sore spot for me and white shirts. No matter how much I try to unbutton my shirts to attain that unbothered Jane Birkin–esque sexiness, I often look like I’m en route to Jewish day school: The collar clasps around my trachea, as if it’s censoring my whole neck and chest. Villanti gets this qualm and adds a weighted inner lining to her pieces for optimal collar spread. “You can pop your collar, and it doesn’t hit your face, and you won’t get your makeup on it,” says Villanti about her shirts. “But it also can open wide, and you can see the clavicle.”

There’s a tabula rasa element to the button-up that gives it broad appeal, whether you’re getting one from Gap, a French luxury fashion house, or a small indie designer. “It is an emotional and symbolic blank slate that enables wearers to project their identity, mood, or power without distraction. It suggests clarity, competence, and self-control and is often associated with professionalism, purity, or a return to order after chaos,” explains London-based psychologist Carolyn Mair, author of the book The Psychology of Fashion. “Given these symbolic associations, wearing a classic white shirt can engender these feelings in the wearer,” she adds. “It suggests a psychological need for simplicity, authenticity, order, or reinvention and a lack of need for embellishment.”

From left: Balenciaga, Thom Browne, Chava Studio,

The benefits of the white shirt are especially welcome right now. We are coming down from a deranged trend bender. During the post-Covid era, stir-crazy with visions of how to dress for the future, we were bludgeoned with relentless “cores” (cottage-core, corporate-core, et cetera), purchasing on overdrive to jam ourselves into a style tribe. After le déluge of passionless microtrends, fashion is in soul-searching flux. “How to get personal style” is a top search term, and it seems like anyone with a TikTok account is emboldened to tell you how to get it. The appeal of the white shirt in this context is obvious: A white shirt means no distractions. A white shirt offers a chance to cut out the noise and start over.

The image architect Law Roach, known for styling Zendaya and Celine Dion, has a whole closet full of white shirts. “I constantly, constantly buy white button-down shirts in all variations,” he said on this magazine’s podcast, The Good Buy, noting that he prefers ones from Amazon or big-and-tall stores. “When I put on a clean, beautiful, crisp white shirt, I just feel styled. I feel confident, I feel put together. You can roll the sleeves, pop the collar. Sometimes I wear them backwards or pull it off the shoulder. It’s so many things.”

As for myself? I love my white shirts coated in soft wrinkles. Each crinkle is a tender signal that I’m wearing my white shirts out—and in. That’s the magic of a white shirt: Starched or not, off-kilter or classic, it can bring your wardrobe, and your life, back into focus.

This story originally appeared in the September 2025 issue of Harper’s Bazaar.

Opening image clockwise from top left: Anne Hathaway at the 2025 Met Gala (Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images); Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, 1999 (Evan Agostini/Getty Images); Beverly Johnson modeling for Calvin Klein, 1975 (Sal Traina/WWD/Penske Media via Getty Images); Lorde in her music video for “What Was That,” 2025 (via YouTube); Uma Thurman and John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, 1994 (Miramax Films/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images); Sade, 1986 (Peter Jordan/Popperfoto via Getty Images); Jane Birkin, 1970 (Dennis Stevens/ANL/Shutterstock); Author Liana Satenstein in her favorite white shirt (courtesy Liana Satenstein); Sharon Stone at the 1998 Oscars (Mychal Watts/Wireimage)