Dress my husband!

[Snoot]

Please

DH is late 30s and lives in shirts! Suits for work and tucked into jeans with a jacket for casual. He only buys good cotton shirts with double cuffs and generally looks very handsome . He's never been able to do casual, trendy looks. Tshirts come out for DIY or extreme heat but that's as far as he'll go. We've got a run of 40th birthday parties coming up and I'd love to get him something other than a shirt to wear with his jeans (which are actually very nice!). Any ideas would be very much appreciated.

My dh wears gant a good bit for casual and the long sleeved polo necks/rugby type tops from Fat face are good quality

Thank you Ruby, it looks like I may have to force myself to go shopping in an actual city, oh no! [Wink] I'm going to have a mooch around our small market town for similar, thanks for the idea.

My H sounds similar to yours. For casual he wears a lot of Abercrombie/Hollister/Superdry polo shirts (slim fitted which fit him best), and has quite a few jumpers from SDry too (nothing too obviously branded). If it's smart causal, then he's back to his shirts.

What does he think would be a good alternative to shirts? Does he want to try polo shirts? Or maybe a merino jumper over a long sleeve t-shirt?

A nice John Smedley type jumper layered over a white tshirt is a good smart casual look. Agree polo shirts are a good go to for the conservative dresser too.

Apparently he doesn't want a polo shirt because he's "already got loads", these are the tshirts he wears in extremis and are well worn and not fantastic IMO. I showed him a rugby-type top and he said, "it's just basically a rugby top, isn't it?" I find it hard to reason with this! I think a vaguely fashionable jumper rather than a jacket over a shirt may be as far as I get.

I'd steer clear of the rugby tops, they are the male equivalent of mumsy (is that dadsy?!). I think a nice crew neck jumper over a shirt always looks good.

Good luck with this.He sounds like my DH.We have progressed after 15 years to 2 trips a year to John Lewis to look at Gant,Ted Baker etc. He also like Fat Face. Apart from this I point to things he might like on the Boden website and he either nods or shakes his head.

I've saved some looks on my phone and I'm going to run them past him when he gets home, apparently he's too busy for my email enquiries

Thank you all for your help, it's great to know I'm not alone!