How To Rumble With Short Sleeves

12:00 PM, July 20 2012

By Noah Wunsch

A short sleeved button down shirt is a mighty powerful thing. But as Uncle Ben said to the Toby Maguire Spider-man (incessantly) “With great power, comes great responsibility.” There is an art to this item of clothing, and it is not to be taken lightly. If you’re walking down the street rocking a short sleever, and you’re wondering why people aren’t stopping you and asking if you’re the ghost of James Dean, sorry Charlie, you’re doing something wrong.

A common mistake is that of influence. Guys are visual creatures. We see something. We like it. We want to have it, because we assume that people will like us as much as we like whatever we liked originally. Confused? Don’t be. It’s simple, just like us!

We’re lazy shoppers, so if we see something on a mannequin that we think looks good, we’ll check the tag, find the right size and buy it without trying it on. This often leads to many a shopping regret, but it is my strong belief that the short sleeved button down is the greatest store displayed mirage of cool, because they don’t come with the mandatory directions.

To help me with this explanation I’ve enlisted the help of Vincent Spano and Nicholas Cage. I’ve asked them to reincarnate their roles from the legendary Rumble Fish, and give a step-by-step tutorial. Here we go:

See that look of disgust that Cage is throwing Spano? Kind of like, you look the way dog shit smells. And Spano’s all like, “What? I saw this shirt in the display window at Bloomingdale’s, it looks super cool!” And Cage is all like, “Look I’ll show you how it’s done, first off roll up those fucking sleeves.”