Tuesday 18 June 2013

Getting Shirty

Sooner or later the realisation hits: we are no longer as young as we used to be. It's hard to accept, but there we are. The slim, fit youth that used to fill these shoes has become lost, and the chances of bowling the Aussies out at Lord’s have diminished as the waistline has expanded.

All of which can lead to problems when searching for walking shirts. The trouble is that many of the available T-shirts are rather clingy or designed more as a baselayer (ie: close-fitting, and without any discernable style. Either way, it’s not very easy on the eye.

But despite the fact that I have grown older and wider over the years (and, in truth, I was never much of a Greyhound) I still need an element of performance from my walking shirts. Ideally they will wick moisture well, smell sweet after a day or several on the trail, be tough enough to wear all day under a rucksack and not snag or deform, wash easily and dry overnight, require no ironing, and look good enough to be presentable in the pub or restaurant at night.

Besides the technical aspects, I also prefer them to be reasonably flattering in cut and styled with a man of my age in mind: there’s nothing worse than a beer-bellied old man trying to carry off a young look with the mistaken idea he looks trendy (actually, that’s not true: tucking a slogan-ed T-shirt into jeans with a brown leather belt is a truly heinous fashion crime, and one that should be avoided at all costs).

Anyway, with all the above in mind, I have been trying out a number of different walking shirts to see how they measure up, most recently on our Camino trip. It’s a tough ask: can it be done?

The products are:

Jack Wolfskin Tumbleweed S/S (TUMBLEWEED)

Jack Wolfskin Tumbleweed S/S

 Karrimor Tech Checked Shirt S/S (KARRIMOR)


Karrimor Tech Checked Shirt S/S

Peter Storm Energy S/S Crew T-Shirt (ENERGY)
Peter Storm Energy S/S Crew T-Shirt


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