Buffalo Plaid

A while ago I was scouting eBay for a wool buffalo-plaid "lumberjack shirt," the kind of thing you can use for layering in winter or as a light jacket in spring. The shirts originated with hunters and other outdoorsy people but became popular for everyday wear; Woolrich has been making them for decades.

(Did you know that hunters prefer wool clothing because, unlike synthetic outerwear, it doesn't make noise when moving?)

I couldn't find a shirt that was in good enough condition for a reasonable enough price, so after a while I stopped looking, but I kept the search I'd set up in my saved eBay searches. This fall, J. Crew had a red-and-black buffalo plaid wool shirt in its Wallace & Barnes line. I thought it might be a nice thing to have, and I got a couple of gift cards for Christmas. The shirt went on sale right after Christmas and had an extra discount stacked on top of it, but as is often the case with J. Crew sales, my size was gone almost immediately.

My customer service contact was unable to locate one of the shirts in my size. Weirdly, a couple of weeks later the shirt went back to full price (when something gets marked down at J. Crew, it tends to stay in the sale section until it's gone). Miraculously, all the sizes were back in stock too, but at full price that wasn't helpful to me.

I decided to revisit my eBay search and see if I could find a shirt that way. It took about a month, but I was successful. Since it was sunny and kind of nice yesterday, I hung it outside to air out, something I do with any item I purchase secondhand. I bought a simple hook at the hardware store and screwed it into one of the porch support pillars, so air can circulate all around a garment:

This shirt isn't new, but it's in excellent condition. There are no moth holes, no snags, no tears, no stains or other weirdness. It was well cared for, and, I suspect, worn very little.

Part of the fun with stuff like this is trying to figure out how old it is. It's made in USA, which means it's probably at least 20 years old, but the dark blue "sheep" tag suggests it's older than that, at least from the '80s. (Does anybody remember the Woolrich store on Boylston Street?) There are only six buttons down the front, which makes me think it's from the '70s.

Woolrich sells these shirts for $119 now. They have seven buttons and the pockets are pattern-matched instead of biased like these, but they've also added an ugly light blue cotton lining in the collar, something that has no place on a shirt like this. And they're made in China. (So's the J. Crew shirt, for that matter.)

I paid one-fourth of that for something that is practically new, and will likely last as long as I do. If you want to try to find something similar on eBay, you should also search for other brands like Filson, L.L. Bean, Pendleton, Johnson's Woolen Mills. Or you could structure a search the way I did: casual shirts, 100% wool or wool blend, long sleeve, button front, and then narrow by your preferred size(s) and color(s).