Dear Mr. Smith: I've gone to a few black-tie parties this winter and have noticed that some formal shirts have a strip of fabric covering the buttons, creating an unmarred shirt front. Is this plain style as dressy as shirt studs?
The reinforced strip of fabric that holds shirt buttons is called the placket. Usually it has two seams, one on each side. On some expensive dress shirts the placket is not reinforced by rows of stitching: It is made by simply folding over the shirt fabric. This is called a French front. If the placket - French or otherwise - is hidden by an extra layer of fabric, the shirt is said to have a fly front.
It's the fly front you're talking about and, yes, it has long been a standard of formal wear. It also has two distinct advantages.
First, it creates, as you noticed, an unblemished snow-white expanse of shirt front that looks dynamite with a black dinner jacket. It is simple and unshowy, which is what current formal fashion demands. (That means no wing collars and even pleated shirts are seen less often than piqué or textured shirts are.)
Second, it spares you the expense of shirt studs. Shirt studs are usually made of jet, onyx or mother of pearl and have gold or silver settings, so they are pricey. They are also a bit of a pain to insert when you are already late from having knotted your bow tie and drop your cufflinks under the bed and a cab is waiting outside. (Here's a hint: Insert studs on the right side of the shirt front before you put it on, then just button up as if they were regular buttons.)
There is something that feels satisfyingly extravagant, however, about expensive shirt studs, so by all means wear them if you like them. Just make sure they are quite small and their settings match your cufflinks. That doesn't mean they have to be identical to your cufflinks, just that the metals are of the same colour. Black and silver studs go perfectly well, for example, with mother-of-pearl and silver links.
Another advantage to plain, unpleated fly-front formal shirts is that you can wear them with business suits and no one will notice. The tie will cover the placket. So your expensive tuxedo shirt doesn't have to hang forlornly in your closet 361 days a year. Even formal shirts with no fly front can be used as everyday shirts: You can purchase, at conservative men's stores, a strip of canvas with a row of ordinary plastic buttons on it that you just slip in behind the placket, on the right side. It works just like shirt studs and is completely invisible.
All this practical ease and flexibility means you have fewer excuses not to own your own dinner jacket.
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