Dealing with exposition. Death to the red-shirts!

One of the challenges with creating an audio play is that I need to be able create a picture of the scene in the listeners head without resorting to a tonne of clunky sounding exposition.

As an example. Let's say you have two characters - John and Nick - and Nick is wearing a red shirt. How do I communicate this to the reader?

Do I have one character say, "Hello John, I see you are wearing a red shirt"?

Sounds a bit odd doesn't it? It seems odd because it's not the way people talk naturally. We don't walk around loudly declaring each and everything that we see for the benefit of an invisible listener.

So the question is: how do I communicate that Nick is wearing a red shirt to the reader in a way that doesn't sound awkward.

Perhaps a few lines of dialogue.
"Hello John"
"Hi Nick"
"What happened to your shirt?"
"I made the mistake of washing it with lighter colors. Now it's faded and everything else is red."

This is a bit more interesting. The dialogue is more believable and in addition to learning that he is wearing a faded red shirt, we have also learned that Nick is not very good at washing his clothes.

Another option is to share the characters inner monologue.
"Hello John", I said.
"Hi Nick", he replied.
That red shirt again, I thought to myself, does he own nothing else?

The third option is to ask if the information needs to be included at all. Is the fact that John is wearing a red shirt necessary to the rest of the story?