Update: Austerity Britain: Turnbull & Asser's online custom shirt

Oh frabjous day! The 'custom' (made-to-measure) shirt I ordered from Turnbull & Asser's online shop has arrived. My Happy Shopper shirt is a fairly heavy pale blue Oxford cloth with cocktail cuffs and the semi-cutaway Regent collar, and none of the optional extras like monogramming, shirt pockets, white cuffs etc.

I wasn't expecting much, to be frank: although I said in the earlier post that there's not much difference between made-to-measure and bespoke if you're a relatively normal shape, I did experience a bit of a rush of buyer's remorse. What if I mis-measured myself and gave in centimetres what I meant to state in inches? I'd be £175 down the Swanee and I'd be left with an item resembling a shirt dress for a capering dwarf (or possibly Suzanne Tully, the small arms expert formerly of Grange Hill and EastEnders).

However, to put the 'Bottom line up front,' as our American cousins say, I'm pretty impressed.

My order was not a particularly demanding brief, but the finished article was exactly as requested, and arrived less than a fortnight after the order was placed - couriered to the door overnight by UPS, even though there was no charge for P&P. So gratification was not deferred for too long.

The order form required a multiplicity of measurements, but there's an idiot's guide which explains how to make them. To avoid attracting comment in the office, I measured myself and, for the trickier question of full sleeve length, I took an old and trusted bespoke shirt. That was a trifle risky, but it appears to have paid off. Although not a perfect fit, the result is certainly much better than could have been achieved from a 'stock special' order, and gives a much better shape than other 'semi-bespoke' options I've tried in the past, even ones involving being measured by a supposedly trained floor-walker.

The shirt is well-finished. There are no imperfections in the cloth - Oxfords can throw up odd little slubs when being man-handled, if for example they catch on a needle or other such point. There are no rogue threads on the seams or meanly-stitched buttons. I've laundered it once and given it a good vigorous ironing, and all is still intact.  The cocktail cuffs are good and deep, and a better shape than those offered by the competition. The collar sits well, although I think I will stick to the standard Turnbull collar on future orders, as the Regent is a bit too severe for my liking, particularly as I don't favour the First Division Footballer knot.

I'll keep you posted on how it survives repeated laundering and encounters with my desktop, and other hazards, but this appears to be an excellent effort by the folks at the Gloucester factory.

Now, the only way you'll find the perfect shirt is by investing a lot of time and money, and accepting a degree of trial and error: there's just no way to replicate online the complex interactions between a customer and a cutter. The online custom shirt route has plenty of risks, not least of which is the question of self-measurement. Certainly it will help if you know your shirting cloths and what you'll be doing in the finished item and where - you can't handle the online swatches, of course, so you need to know your poplins from your voiles from your twills  - and you really need to understand the structure of a well-fitting shirt - how much room you need around chest, arm-holes and waist for comfortable movement, what kind of length is practical etc.

But if you are fairly confident, have no outrageous demands and want to cut corners while retaining the imprimatur of an established shirt-maker, this is pretty good value for money.

Inflation: The shirt on my back

I'm not normally attentive to consumer inflation and can never remember what a loaf of bread costs from one week to the next, let alone in comparison with a year ago. However, of late I have been forced to confront some painful economic realities. Like most commodities, a healthy bubble was forming in cotton prices, which hit an all-time high in 2008, then promptly fell off a cliff like everything else when people started asking 'But who's going to pay for all this shit?' Good news for the sartorially minded, you might think.



But no. Encouraged no doubt by the US government's ZIRP, the endless capacity for Turbo Tim and Black Hawk Ben to sweep it under their inner carpets and keep hitting 'print' like pellet-happy lab-rats, and the desperation among investors to find some kind of asset in which there is more than 0% return, cotton prices exceeded the '08 tops earlier this year and have since just kept going.

This has had a tangible and regrettable impact on the Wonderful World of Bumwad. In about 2004, Turnbull & Asser charged about £80 a pop for their off-the-shelf poplin shirts and £120 for Sea Island. This was at a time when Thomas Pink was around £65, for a distinctly inferior product, made in God-knows-what part of the Warsaw Pact.

Now, following yet another surreptitious price hike, Turnbull are asking £135 for the same shirt and £190 for Sea Island quality - and that is despite what appear to be slight alterations in manufacture (the collar band no longer has a central, lateral line of stitching) that could have been occasioned by costs.

Ditto for the lovely Mrs Willis, who has just raised her prices across the board. Not many years ago, her stock English cotton shirts were about £80; Swiss voile were about £95. When, having moved up in the world a notch or two, I ordered my first batch of bespoke shirts from her in 2007, they were £200 each. Now, her ready to wear shirts are £140; stock specials are around £190-290, and bespoke is £240 plus - and an eye-watering £350 for Sea Island.

Alexandra at the shop tells me it is not related to the recent poor cotton harvest in the US, the Asian subcontinent and Egypt. The resulting price hikes might indeed affect the margins of the lower orders of shirt-makers, but Mrs W's factory uses mostly Swiss and Italian cottons; and apparently much of the shortfall was made up by a bumper crop in Brazil. So the most recent increase was because they hadn't reviewed prices with suppliers for a couple of years, and the retail prices were becoming unsupportable. I can only speculate, but perhaps the continuing weakness of the pound sterling against the Euro plays a further part; and commercial rents in central London have of late been going up. Or perhaps Mervyn King - a man in a seemingly perpetual state of surprise about inflation - does her books.

Now I'm no opponent of austerity, and will happily surrender the absurd benefits granted under the Blair-Brown tyranny that were nothing more than painfully transparent attempts to bribe me with my own money. I'm ready to play my part, and admittedly this is scarcely a hard-luck story guaranteed to stimulate the already hyperactive lachrymal glands of the BBC News home affairs team. (Although, in his role as champion of the squeezed middle, I suppose the Rt Hon Edward Miliband might use my case to make a point at PMQs.) If I'm going to the soup kitchen, I want to look like I don't need to be there. Mrs W can relax for a little while longer: I have no intention of buying my clothes from outlet stores like Thomas Pink, Lewin or Charles Fuckwit. 'We're all in this together,' I suppose - but that should not apply to our shirts.

But I do wonder if Mrs W realises that a significant component of my loyalty to her derives from her fragrant demeanour and the prospect of a sympathetic smile on my occasional visits.


You get further with a kind word, a gun and some well-polished riding boots
than you do with just a kind word

I have no wish to drive her to penury, her children to the workhouse; but frankly, if she doesn't start putting in more time at the shop, I might have to move next door to Turnbull - where many of their floorwalkers appear rather more liberal with their attentions.