I was wearing a light blue chambray shirt from J.Crew on the night I first met my wife. It was 2016, and I’d just turned 25. And, having bought the shirt with my first substantial freelance paycheck, I wore it everywhere: to interviews, on road trips and airplanes, on assignments, and, evidently, to dinner parties on the Upper East Side.Amid the squall of untucked gingham shirts and Patagonia vests in style at the time, the textured ruggedness of chambray jumped out at me when I saw this shirt on the rack. It felt like something that belonged in the closet of Indiana Jones or Robert Redford rather than in my own. Something about the irregularity of its yarns and its not-quite-slim fit felt impossibly cool yet unpretentious, at ease without looking careless, elegant yet decidedly not fussy. It was, in short, everything I was not and everything I wanted to be.For nearly 10 years, I wore this shirt, almost to tatters. Over time, the cloth faded to a pale, whitish shade of blue, the fabric at the elbows became almost sheer, and the hems started to unfurl. But I refused to give up on my longtime staple.So I returned to J.Crew to buy a replacement, and in its place I found something new: a chambray shirt full of small improvements yet still bearing all the charm of the one I had bought in my 20s.