With the ice slowly melting — even in New York — every man's favorite time of the year is approaching. Some call it “spring,” I call it “lightweight outerwear season.” As I look out my window in sunny Berlin, the long-awaited wardrobe thaw feels imminent, making it all the more urgent to  address a particularly stubborn elephant in the room: the reliably undefinable overshirt, AKA the shirt jacket. Is it, or is it not, just a jacket? And at what point is this type of jacket actually just a shirt? Let's settle this.

No one is immune to the gravitational pull of the titular top, nor is anyone above the discussion on what umbrella category the overshirt falls under. For practical, temperature-related reasons and aesthetic ones, overshirts of sorts have been around for as long as we’ve had clothes, with particular influences on today’s iterations stemming from military garb and workwear of the late 19th century.

It wouldn’t be until the 2010s for the silhouette to claim a proper name of its own, once the overshirt was properly distinguished  by qualities pertaining to the weight and stiffness of the fabric used, as well as its pockets, mostly button fastenings, and lining (or lack thereof, rather). Now, sturdy canvas cottons, denim, wools, and leathers can all take the form of this purposefully ambiguous, devilishly handsome article of clothing.

To this day, I'm not sure I've received as many compliments on any of my possessions as I have on the Acne Studios shirt jacket I bought a good few moons ago at the brand's Copenhagen outlet store (RIP) to treat myself for a hand-in at university I'd pulled an all-nighter for. This shirt jacket singlehandedly set off a lifelong enchantment with the language of layering. I’ve worked to become fluent in it ever since, like any decent fashionphile does today. It's beguiling, near life-changing garment in anyone’s style journey, so much so that troves of memes and TikToks have called out how these hybrid transitional pieces will do great damage to the wallet if you’re not careful, or at least very selective. 

That Acne overshirt has by now left little trace on the internet, but considering that  designers from A to Z (literally, from Auralee to Zegna) have since unleashed countless of their own variants of the shirt jacket out into the world, one can hardly suffer from a shortage of options to choose from — rainproof or suede, pinstriped or flanneled, high or low-priced; by Lemaire or Loro Piana (or COS, Kapital, Uniqlo or Yohji); to be piled above stacks of sweaters when it's chilly; or to double as a simple shirt shirt when it's warm.

What distinguishes a shirt jacket from a mere jacket (or from a mere shirt), is perhaps not as interesting as the epiphany that because it is so amorphous and abstract an item, it's irresistible, indispensable even. It’s a “both and” situation, wherein the versatility imbues this garment with a delight greater than the sum of its parts. The beauty of a shirt jacket is that it can be whatever you want it to be in the moment — whichever way the temperature drops.

Written by Max Migowski, Highsnobiety Shopping Editor

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