July can be a sleepy month in fashion—if not in American politics—so we thought this would be an ideal time to do an investigation on some of our favorite runway trends from the past year, focusing on those that were styling-based as opposed to a new garment silhouette. We wanted to be able to try it with pieces that already exist in our closets; no calling in clothes and no purchases allowed. We settled on five key styling hacks: double polos, sheer anything, aprons, skirts over pants, and the backward shirt, which we go into today.
As with The Row’s oft-discussed “swing a literal towel around your neck“ styling, we wanted to know: Can we pull off these trends IRL? Or is their allure just the fact that they’re on the runway? And like literally everyone with friends, we often text each other when getting dressed; it’s especially fun to experiment when you have someone just as invested in the experiment as you are.
First up in our styling-hacks experiment is the backward-button-down-shirt trend, which we have been low-key obsessed with since Dries Van Noten’s fall 2024 show. On the surface it’s simple: Get a shirt, and put it on backward. But as we soon discovered, not all shirts are made equal.
Photo: Courtesy of José Criales-Unzueta & Laia Garcia-Furtado
José Criales-Unzueta: Here’s my first attempt. I love this Christopher John Rogers shirt because it’s very light, so I thought it would work well for this. I paired it with a skirt to keep the silhouette easy.
Laia Garcia-Furtado: The CJR shirt and the skirt have a real summer, breezy vibe. Did you button your shirt all the way to the top? I realized that that makes a big difference in the fit of the shirt.
Criales-Unzueta: It definitely does. I buttoned it all the way up at first, and it did not work—it was a little too…buttoned up. (Sorry!!)
Garcia-Furtado: Lmaooo.
Criales-Unzueta: I did two undone to give some shoulder action. The collar is also very flimsy, which works. It must also be said that I had no one to help with the buttons, which added a layer of difficulty here.
Photo: Courtesy of Laia Garcia-Furtado & José Criales-Unzueta
Garcia-Furtado: Yeah, I buttoned only the top two buttons, mostly because I feel like we’re not supposed to actually do all the buttons—like, then suddenly you are in a weird clown costume. For my first attempt, I actually layered two shirts—which we’ll get into later this week as well. One is a sheer beige shirt from Maria McManus that I had a bit of a laundry mishap with and now it has some weird stains on it, but I didn’t just want to give it up. Then a Collina Strada shirt on top. I think it’s the perfect combo because I love the Collina shirt, but I struggled with figuring out how to wear it to the office without it being so sheer, so this was my solve. I tried leaving it untucked, but it felt a little too messy.