An $18 button-down I bought online for a joke costume has been one of my most reliable hiking layers for nearly a decade. Here’s why it outperforms more expensive pieces.
Yes, I know how creepy this looks. (Photo: Adam Roy)
Updated July 8, 2026 10:56AM
If we’re going to talk about the shirt, we have to start with the picture.
I’m standing in front of a white wall, wearing a button-down fleece shirt in a classic lumberjack-style red-and-black plaid pattern. On my head, I have on a rubber Chihuahua mask, colored black with a hint of brown, studded with two unblinking plastic eyes. In my arms, I’m cradling my dog, Hobbes, an actual, 5-pound Chihuahua, who’s wearing a jacket in the same plaid pattern as my shirt and staring into the middle distance with his ears flattened against his head. If I’m being generous, it has the grainy quality of an awkward long-lost family photo; if I’m not, it looks like the snapshot someone mails the newspaper alongside a cut-and-paste note that begins “PUBLISH THIS TOMORROW OR I WILL START KILLING AGAIN.”
The idea was innocent enough: I wanted to do a matching costume with my Chihuahua, Hobbes. I bought a rubber Chihuahua mask that roughly matched the facial structure of my mutt. Hobbes, a dog built for the hottest weather, already had a plaid coat to keep him from freezing in the Colorado winter. I scrolled Amazon until I found the perfect layer to complement it, a red and black synthetic fleece button up from Wrangler, on sale for all of $18.
I soon realized the downside of doing a couple’s costume with your dog, which is that it only makes sense when you can bring the dog. I made it through about five minutes of our office Halloween party before I decided it would be better to take the mask off than continue creeping out and confusing all my coworkers by milling around wearing a rubber dog face. When I got home, I tossed it into a drawer somewhere and just greeted trick-or-treaters in my street clothes. I haven’t seen my Chihuahua disguise since.
The shirt, though, hung in my closet, seeing occasional use on laundry days, until the first big snow of the season left the Denver metro area blanketed in fresh powder and inspired me to grab my Nordic skis and head to our local park. I don’t remember why I decided to grab it instead of one of the dozen technical midlayers I own; I was probably planning on going to work at a cafe afterward and didn’t want to look like a dork. I buttoned it on under a windshell and left.
Surprisingly, that cheap button-up held its own. At tempo, it breathed well; when I stopped to check my messages, the thick fleece kept me cozy. The fit hit a happy medium, not too tight or too boxy. Over the next few months, I found myself reaching for it more and more. I layered it under a shell for midwinter ski days (and apres); I wore it on early-spring backpacking trips, and tossed it on to sit around the campfire on summer nights. Even with the pile of grid-fleeces and lightweight insulated layers in my closet, I kept choosing that lumberjack shirt.
Therein lies the trick with hiking clothes: once you get past the fancy fabrics, the down fill power ratings, and the DWR coatings, you have to like wearing them. I think we forget that throughout most of history, when hiking’s main purpose was to get us to the places we needed to be, people have hiked in their everyday clothes. And while I wouldn’t recommend hitting the trail in jeans—tried it, feels like a good idea until it rains—I’ve found as many of my pieces on Goodwill racks and in lost-and-found boxes as I’ve bought at REI. While the Wrangler shirt wasn’t the absolute warmest, most breathable, or lightest of the bunch, it was by far the coziest, and good enough at all the other stuff to earn its place in my pack.
In the seven or so years since, I’ve worn through, lost, or retired more shirts, jackets, and midlayers than I can remember. Hobbes—now a good bit greyer—seems to have mostly forgiven me for making him into a prop for a Halloween getup. But that cheap plaid button-up still sees regular use; over the past year, I’ve taken it on fall leaf hikes, ski tours, and a weeklong rafting trip through Nahanni National Park in the Northwest Territories . It’s the longest I’ve ever worn a costume for—and for $18, that’s not a bad deal.
