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"Even though we are going to shatter thousands of lives, wearing white is gonna make the blood look so pretty."

Ever notice how much more dramatic blood looks on a white background? It follows that wearing a white shirt can be more hazardous than wearing a Red Shirt. The death of a white shirt wearer will be much bloodier than that of your traditional red shirt.

Also, in Korea, China and any Fantasy Counterpart Culture strongly influenced by the same, white is the traditional color for funeral dresses.

A quite literal interpretation of the trope existed in the Bulgarian army around the beginning of the 20th century as some common soldiers would keep a white shirt for last and put it on when defeat seemed imminent, in odd contrast to Bring My Red Jacket.

Compare Snow Means Death, which uses the color white to similar effect. See also Ethereal White Dress, for when the violent event is only implied or is part of a backstory, Villain in a White Suit, Blood-Splattered Wedding Dress, and Bedsheet Ghost. Contrast Bring My Red Jacket.

Since this is a Death Trope, expect unmarked spoilers in the examples below!

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Example subpages:

• Anime & Manga
• Films — Live-Action
  • Saw
• Live-Action TV
• Video Games

Other examples:

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    Fan Works

• Equestria Girls: Friendship Souls: Besides greatly increasing Rarity's control over her blood creations, her Fullbring turns her whole form snow-white, making it easy to spot even the tiniest drop of blood. Word of God it symbolizes her willingness to kill her opponents, and accept the consequences.
• In Final Toll, Cremia decides not to change out of her signature white dress while waiting for the moon to crash. She finds it fitting that she'd die in it.
• In The Victors Project during the rescue expedition to save her daughter, Mrs. Everdeen fatally shoots Luster while he's wearing a white tuxedo. He bleeds, with the injury being compared to a red flower.
• your move, instigator (draw your weapon and hold your tongue): While Team 14 is accepting an award for their service in the Third Shinobi War, Tenten coughs into her hand, then absently wipes it across her shirt. While she survives, this causes the onlookers to go silent at the sight of an eight-year-old in a bloody top, reminding them of just what they're celebrating.

    Literature

• In the book Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Santiago Nasar decides to wear an unstarched white linen shirt and is murdered in a very bloody way that day.
• In the Doctor Who Expanded Universe novel The Sleep of Reason, Fitz makes the questionable fashion choice of wearing white trousers. As a Genre Savvy character like himself should have expected, he ends up with a leg injury. It's not fatal and not even that bad, but it sure seems to bleed a lot:

  His trousers were blossoming from white to red.

• In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Harry Potter slices Draco Malfoy up like a Christmas ham in the bathroom and Draco nearly dies, but he gets better. His white shirt was covered in his blood.
• The Stormlight Archive: At the end of Words of Radiance, Adolin Kholin finally decides he's had enough of Torol Sadeas' attempts to undermine Dalinar's plans and stabs him to death. During this scene, Adolin's narration notes that Sadeas is wearing a white outfit that does not suit his ruddy complexion.
• The Thrawn Trilogy - Grand Admiral Thrawn. Crimson blossom of blood; spotless white uniform. Even his murder was stylish.

  "But...it was so artistically done..."

    Music

• Uhm, does "White Shirt" by The Charlatans (as in "She laughed and then she died") possibly refer to this trope?

    Mythology & Religion

• Hēibái Wúcháng ("Black and White Impermanence"), a duo of Shinigami in Chinese Taoist mythos. As the name implies, one of them (also known as "Xiè Bì'ān", "General Xiè", "Old Man Seven", etc. depending on variation) dresses in white robes.

    Professional Wrestling

• Downplayed example. Jim Cornette was once attacked by Paul E. Dangerously while wearing a white suit, which was soaked in Cornette's blood. Cornette purposely wore a white suit to make the blood stand out more.

    Theatre

• Double Subverted in The Lieutenant of Inishmore, in which Mad Padraic wears a wife-beater when he gets down to torturing, and it gets covered with other people's blood. Until he gets killed, messily.
• In an extension, after each character dies in the musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, they're outfitted with a red-streaked white shirt for the rest of the show (since they still need to be on-stage as the chorus or to play instruments or whatever, depending on staging). In one production, the dead characters put white makeup on and powdered their hair white/grey, and spent the rest of the show as ghosts.
• The titular Elisabeth is dressed in a pristine white dress after she's stabbed to death by Lucheni, in her reunion with the Grim Reaper. It's also the same white nightgown she wears as a young woman for her "I Want" Song, "Ich gehör nur mir" (I Only Belong to Myself).

    Visual Novels

• In Hatoful Boyfriend, three of the cast members are white doves. During BBL, one is stabbed. Character's images don't really change in this dating game unless the characters are clothed, but an exception is made here.

    Webcomics

• Mr. Blank from Sam & Fuzzy wears an all-white ninja tunic, which tends to get blood-splattered when he goes into combat (though not with his blood). His death is remarkably bloodless if we ignore the part where he got his face and mask torn off by a killer robot — he fell off the side of a building.
• Tag Dream: Yuuka starts the competition wearing a white swimsuit, but as she beats the ever-loving crap out of her opponents, it becomes red.

    Real Life

• Briefly mentioned in the Seppuku article: the Samurai would wear a white kimono for ritual suicide.
• Junior officers in the French Army in 1914 thought it chic to die in white gloves, perhaps so they could press their hand to the fatal wound and remove it dramatically. The French Army was...slightly crazy at this point in time, with a very Napoleonic and romantic attitude to the way modern war should be waged, and it paid accordingly.
• The Flag of Austria has been said to symbolize the duke of Babenberg's white surcoat getting soaked in blood in a battle. Only the portion of the surcoat which was tucked under his belt remained white.
  • The Austrian army during the Musketry Era wore white. Historians are divided as to whether this trope caused any handicap. The pragmatically-minded British, on the other hand, wore red for precisely this reason.
  • Other armies of that era also wore white, e. g. those of pre-Revolutionary France, Saxony, and Spain.
  • Which is a fun myth, but sadly, only a myth - even a cursory experience would cause one to realize blood still darkens and dyes red cloth of that hue. In truth, red dye from madder was just cheaper for the British to produce, and officers enjoyed the scarcity, expense, and thus prestige of brighter cochineal.
• Supposedly invoked by the family of assassinated Filipino senator Benigno Aquino, Jr. (after he was gunned down by soldiers while descending from the Manila International Airport). They (most notably his own mother) decided to not embalm his corpse and show him with his blood-stained, all-white outfit in full view.

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Source: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WhiteShirtOfDeath

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