In writing the Traveling Light guide, I wrote about the Wool & Prince merino wool dress shirts — and how much I like them. I still wear that shirt almost all the time, however I recently picked up Outlier’s S120 no pocket Pivot shirt, another all merino button down.
This shirt is quite a bit more money than the Wool & Prince shirts, but also quite different. The shirt itself has a slimmer, more tailored, cut which depending on your body shape might be a deal breaker. For me it fits my body near perfectly in XL.
There’s no need to belabor the points of this shirt so let’s hit some bullet points instead:
- The shirt feels thicker than the Wool & Prince
- The shirt looks a little less crisp than my Wool & Prince — which lends to slightly less formal look, but still fine in almost any situation a button down is.
- The wool is much softer than Wool & Prince and thus feels more luxurious.
Overall, when comparing just the shirts to each other, I greatly prefer the Outlier S120. However, when factoring in price, it’s not enough of an improvement for me to no longer look to Wool & Prince shirts.
In other words: I am really glad to have this shirt and heartily recommend it, but for my next shirt purchase I will be sticking with Wool & Prince. One reason to consider this shirt is if you want the absolute softest merino shirt you can get — I have yet to feel merino softer than Outlier’s. If I could only have one merino dress shirt I would pick this one, but since I want some more variety, I am going to be looking at Wool & Prince for most — which also has to do with them having more than two color options.