Yet again, Rico is clueless

Rico says he did not even know there were 'restaurant shirts', but Dvid Colman has the story in The New York Times:

Though Robert Graham shirts are sold nationally in hundreds of stores, the label does not yet engender the kind of instant recognition that makes marketing people salivate. But Kristina Davis knew it. An owner of Navy Beach, a year-old beachfront restaurant in Montauk, New York, Ms. Davis has not only spotted Robert Graham shirts at her restaurant and others in the Hamptons, she has also bought a couple for her husband, Frank, a finance executive in New York City.
Don’t give her too much credit for an eagle eye, though. Shirts like these are hard to miss. In bright prints, often with contrasting plackets, cuffs, or collars, they are bringing a jolt of Sun Belt pizazz to the once-chillier summer wardrobes of the Northeast. Unapologetically festive, they are cropping up at cocktail parties and restaurants, leavening a dressy sense of occasion with the horseplay esprit of your old college-kegger shirt.
“I’d say it’s been building for a couple of summers out here,” Ms. Davis said. “You see guys wearing them untucked with jeans and loafers, when they’re being casual, or maybe tucked into linen trousers if they want to be more dressy.”
Showy dress shirts have never been entirely absent from the retail landscape. Etro made its name with them, and Robert Graham has made them for ten years, said Robert Stock, a company founder. He noted that the market has grown faster south of the Mason-Dixon line (notably in Florida and Texas, as well as in California) than north of it. But in the last year, sales of such shirts have had such an uptick that Eric Jennings, the men’s fashion director of Saks Fifth Avenue, found himself needing a way to describe them. Some eighty years ago, such garments were called sport shirts. Today that term is most likely to apply to Polo shirts. As Mr. Jennings and this writer have found, the shirts are not easy to classify. Event shirt? Cocktail shirt? “For lack of something better, we’ve been calling them restaurant shirts,” he said. “That’s where they all seem to be headed.”
There is no base line of ostentation for what makes a shirt restaurant-caliber. But a simple stripe won’t do, nor will a run-of-the-mill gingham or check, not unless they’re put under a microscope and blown up about 10x (as they say in the optics racket). No, think graphic, think floral, think paisley. Just don’t think too hard, or you’ll never have the nerve to wear one.
“The first time I got my husband one— it was flowered— he said, ‘There’s no way I am wearing that,’ ” Ms. Davis said. “But I said, ‘You’re going to put it on, and I’m going to give you a Scotch, and then we’re going out to dinner.’ No one made fun of him, and he actually got a lot of compliments.”
Remember, though: Even go-for-broke means fine-tuning the style. Worn untucked, shirts that are too big and baggy run the risk of looking like sloppy holdovers from the Nineties. Likewise, long tails on a shirt usually mean they were designed to disappear, so tucking in a restaurant shirt means your pants better meet the GQ standard: “Slim, low-waist jeans or khakis,” said Madeline Weeks, GQ’s fashion director. “Worn with an interesting belt, like the ones at Barbara Shaum in the East Village.”
If you plan to leave your tails untucked, the shirt should look as if this was meant to be, with a slim and short cut. Topman has a great selection, several in floral patterns that are more groovy than girly. Another option is a shirt in a stout fabric like oxford cloth or cotton canvas that will hold its crisp shape throughout a summer night. The outsize plaids at Thom Browne are nigh on perfect, so get them while you can. With the economy still sputtering, they may be the only huge checks you’ll see this year.

Rico says that, amazingly, he used to look just like this guy, when young; odd, to see yourself (well, nearly; Rico was cuter) after all these years... (And we wore shirts just like this, paisley especially, back in the Seventies.)