The crimson, white and powder blue colours on this dress shirt were inspired by those of the English football club, Aston Villa. However, let me be clear from the very start there is no association of this shirt design, myself or anything related with the Aston Villa football club. It was just the colour scheme that inspired me so I named my shirt appropriate to give credit where it’s due. I’m a Manchester United fan. 🙂

This is the first shirt of my work uniform collection. The style is a white yoke tunic with Mandarin collar and interesting three colour combinations that could be worn with pants of the same colour, or of a complementary colour to show a four colour scheme like in the photo. I have a multi-coloured pants collection ready for the dress shirts.

The yokes could be of any shape, but will mostly be horizontal, curved or V angled bottom, front and back. I like the yokes white against my darker skin, while the other colours chosen will likely be one light and one dark tone. I will sometimes put a stripe on the bottom of the yokes, or epaulettes or some other design feature to highlight a colour. Otherwise, it’s colour blocking, with the scheme evoking a feeling like the soft one seen here, with curved yokes minimizing hard straight lines, points and angles. I needed to keep myself in check to be soft during some meetings today where feedback was requested so I wore this shirt. 🙂

Crimson, powder blue and white is a slightly unusual colour combination off the popular red, white and blue beaten track. I find it very refreshing to the eye. I have crimson buttons with a little sun like feature on them on the cuffs and collar to round out the look.

I could have worn this with matching white, blue or crimson pants, but I felt like an attendant in the Jetsons movie or some old school futuristic movie, so I opted for the grey. Some other occasions, perhaps, but not work. I’ll stick to grey and black pants for work with this shirt.

Rating

I’ll give this one a silver. I like the colour combination. The yoke lines up but button holes have margins of error to slide so movement may make it look a bit off like here. It’s a little soft for my liking, in which case the round yoke to amplify it rather than a V-yoke to counter it probably doesn’t help, but I’m keeping my V-yokes for some other dress shirts rather than over use it.

I think if Aston Villa had their printed jersey with a V or flat yoke in white, bottom crimson and sleeves blue, heart collar in crimson and blue on white, it would make a beautiful alternate jersey. Alternate short colours among the three, maybe with blue and crimson stripe down one or both sides. They seem to have some yellow in their colour scheme. Not sure if it’s official or not, but keep it away from the white is all I can say. I don’t like that at all.

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