Folks that know me see me most often in a light blue chambray long sleeve shirt. I love those things, have more than a half dozen in my closet! My fondness for them goes way back to my early folk singing days as a kid. Chambray is a airy cotton weave, material coming mostly from India, great shirts made there, too. Both my brother and I learned to iron our own clothes, a task I thoroughly enjoy! At one point in my childhood, I got so good at ironing shirts, could knock out a bunch in an hour, I thought of starting a home business to compete with the small Chinese family laundry in town who charged $00.21 each, mildly starched and folded.

Among the grass-roots folk music types, Woody Guthrie popularized the look the most. His music identified the social challenges of the working class, and quite frankly, although he mistakenly lauded the good intentions of collective bargaining (e.g. his positive stance for Labor Unions) he came across genuinely as a voice for the downtrodden workers of America. It just so happened they wore blue chambray shirts to the factories, thus the moniker, “blue-collar” workers. It was during this same time, down to the present, that prison inmates wore similar shirts. Even white-collar criminals were issued the blues!

Now don’t get too confused here, there was an upside. Navy men wore those blue chambray shirts, too! White caps and slacks topped off with blue chambray set our “men in blue” off from the other miscreants donning chambray. But it took several decades for blue to crawl out of the mire of ridicule. Thanks be to likes of Ralph Lauren and others to spear-head a blues revolution! Blue is chick! Blue is fashionable! Blue is dress-down Friday! Blue chambray can now hold its own in the business world with the traditional white “white-collar” shirt. And if you work for a large IT company, jeans, chambray shirt and herring bone weave blazer is as close to ‘formal’ as you will get!

Let’s face it. Blue chambray shirts for both men and women are here to stay. They are not a trend revisited ( I hear bell-bottoms are nearing a comeback) but a mainstay of the revolution! Chicken Little thought the sky was falling, no it didn’t, only our perceptions. Viva La Revolucion