The early history of chambray ­stretches to the French town of Cambrai and a dense linen, cambric, long woven there. It came to the United States in 1790 when, defying laws against exporting textile technology, a Briton named Samuel Slater built a mill in Pawtucket, R.I., and produced cambric’s cotton analog by cross-­weaving a colored thread and a white fill. While the Western shirt, with a curve to the yoke and a mother-­of-­pearl personality to the pockets, became a cowboy commonplace, the more prosaic work shirt was hammered into the iconography of machine shops, quarries and high steel. Manufactured nationwide in the early 20th century, the shirts appeared under burly labels — Big Yank, Iron Ace, PowrHouse — and featured a wealth of detail and essential ornaments that qualified them as utilitarian triumphs. They boasted of being union-­made, vat-­dyed, Sanforized, triple-­stitched at the seams and sewn with indestructible buttons.

Enduring the work of demagogues and demographers with grace, the shirt settled in as a signifier of the apolitical Everyman. (The great poet of the shirt must be Stephen King, who, in novel after novel, writes them onto characters’ bodies, short for the common man.) At the same time, it slipped easily into its role as a marker of bohemian chic. In ‘‘The Adventures of Augie March,’’ by Saul Bellow, the hero tells us that his brother attended Communist meetings on account of the company: ‘‘He went for the big babes in leather jackets, low heels, berets and chambray workshirts.’’ At online boutiques, you can now buy an expensive chambray shirt named for Neal Cassady in an attempt to summon daydreams of a sainted beatnik.

Given the muted elegance of the product — the delicacy of its drape, the coziness of its texture, the cool of its blue — it was inevitable that the fashion system should snap up the chambray shirt and recontextualize its appeal. An item familiar from the Rosie the Riveter poster, now reproduced ceaselessly in the J.Crew catalog, qualifies as a characteristic garment of the decade. The new-­school chambray shirt is, for women, a natural complement to the slouchiness of the boyfriend jean and an item praised as a way of attaining an ‘‘effortless’’ cool, meaning that it is representative of an elegance achieved by struggling to give the impression of not having to try too hard. For men, it is likewise accepted as a new staple of daily dress, a fail-­proof means of mixing up your suit or impressing your date; put together with the chukka boots and the flat-­front chinos, a chambray shirt transforms a lad into the very model of the modern bro about town.