Shirt-makers: Some thoughts

[Note: This post is based upon the 'shirts' section - now extracted - from the post originally called 'Symmetry'. The post had become too long and unwieldy.]

Bargepole (Michael Bywater) once remarked to the effect that the test of a good shirt-maker is that one should be able to walk into the shop after three large martinis and emerge bearing items that when worn will not make you look like a regional BBC TV presenter. While Ian Masters remains in many respects a model citizen, he offers no suitable guidance for those in need of sartorial advice - except, perhaps, 'go thou and do otherwise' aka 'the Alibhai Brown fallacy.'


Pockets
Much piss and wind is expended in some style blogs about the far-from-crucial issue of whether to have a pocket on a shirt. I have no fixed views on this matter, although I am aware it excites some people to paroxysms. Such shirts are probably not suitable for business attire, but then, in my view, neither are khaki 'slacks' or cardigans, yet those items excite no similar apoplexy.

To be sure, pockets break the symmetry of a business shirt - but that scarcely matters if one keeps one's coat on. And the outbreast pocket of the suit coat is equally asymetric, and the ticket pocket, come to that. The traditional objection - 'What would you keep in it?' - is perhaps more plausible, but that functional criticism applies to so many vestigial details of modern clothing, from the buttons on the back of a morning coat (although not mine, which are of course functional) to the trouser turn-up and the cuff button, so that cannot itself account fully for the violence of the belief.

No, the no-pocket 'rule' is a form of snobbery, thoughtless in the worst possible way, that has its origins in the preservation of distinction between the manual labourer or tradesman and the professional classes. Yet pockets are perfectly acceptable on casual or working shirts - garments in which one might garden or paint watercolours, and where one might need to keep one's cigarette lighter to hand; and if one were to choose to wear a button-down collar, a pocket is de rigeur. Bear that in mind, and, if you fear being mistaken for a carpenter or wish by your appearance to communicate your professional status or aspiration, then act accordingly. I will neither condemn nor applaud your choice.

Incidentally the officers messes of many army regiments consider the pocket issue for some reason to be a major faux pas. The prohibition on pockets is applied with such zeal by many subalterns, particularly in cavalry regiments, that anyone wearing a shirt with a pocket is liable to be man-handled, the pocket forcibly removed. Often the victims of this boorishness are members of the mess attached from the support arms.


The Emelet was wearing a shirt with a pocket!

This seems to me to represent the sort of dogmatism that is born of ignorance, and quite wrong-headed. It would of course be unnecessary were the old practice of dressing for dinner observed, but very few regiments still do this. Now, one ought not to present oneself for dinner clad for the compost heap, but if the regiments in question are content to dine in business attire, it is absurd to isolate a detail of shirting and construct it as a shibboleth.

Apart from the illustrating the occasional brutalities of the pack, this demonstrates the universal human need for boundaries, and the crisis of authority that results when they are absent. When traditions are relaxed, eroded or wilfully abandoned - in this case, the requirement that all officers dress for dinner in black tie - man will flounder and resort to creating for himself his own rules ex nihilo, which, divorced from their proper historical and social context, are arbitrary and, under malign influence mutate rapidly into violence.

And, strangely, many young officers see nothing inherently wrong in wearing velvet coats to dinner when guests in other regiment's messes, and would goggle at you in mute, tongue-flapping incomprehension if you pointed out their error.

Bespoke
If you can afford it - it is certainly an expensive luxury - bespoke shirts from a proper English shirtmaker are really the only option. 


Evelyn Waugh: a Turnbull & Asser man

Most places require a minimum order - three is typical but some places ask for five - and starting prices are around £175 for a generalist men's outfitter like New & Lingwood, and considerably more for a proper shirtmaker like Turnbull and Asser or Mrs Willis.

A recent but notable arrival is Sean O'Flynn, on Sackville Street, formerly a head cutter at New & Lingwood and apprenticed at Huntsman. I haven't ordered from him, and don't be put off by the big fat tie knot he's wearing on his website: I have heard uniformly excellent things about his work. Incidentally, most tailors will have a pet shirt-maker, if they don't themselves offer (and probably sub-contract) the services, so you should probably seek their advice.

Another more below-the-radar guy is Frank Foster. Appointment only and no retail space to speak of, and consequently slightly cheaper, with starting prices around £150, and a five shirt minimum order.

If you need persuading to part with such sums, you could justify it as a 'sustainable' option, supporting as it does native English craftsmen, and providing a bop on the nose to upstart foreigners like Duchamp and Charvet. And you can easily spend more than £200 in somewhere like the menswear basement of Harvey Nichols on a vastly inferior Indonesian-produced item, every bit as shoddy as a garment selling in Gap for a tenth of the price.

Shirts and suits
On most occasions, button-cuffed shirts work best with single-breasted coats (the rule of odds and evens again). These can be of a single or two-button fastening cuff, the three-button barrel cuff associated with Turnbull & Asser, and the cocktail (or Portofino) cuff, associated commonly with Sean Connery’s James Bond, and almost certainly a Turnbull innovation. The latter is my favourite.Fit

The cocktail cuff in action

Similarly, double-breasted coats justify double (or ‘French’) cuffed shirts. Double breasted coats look absurd with single cuffed shirts, and even the cocktail cuff looks a bit odd.

As an aside, a character in Philip Hensher’s witty nineties novel Kitchen venom observes that double cuffs with a single-breasted suit make you look like a pimp. I tend to agree. You might, however, get away with double cuffs if you wear a three-piece suit, particularly if the waistcoat has adornments such as lapels:


Single-breasted, double cuffs: Seymour Goldfarb Jr; heir to the Goldfarb Girdles fortune.

The cocktail cuff is a compromise that is both smart and simple - no cufflinks required - and looks good with two- or three-piece single-breasted suits. 


Single cuff, single-breasted. Dashed smart.

'Casual'
The need for coherence and proportion - see 'Symmetry' - applies in all modes of dress, from the high formal to the low domestic comfort-wear.

A particular bugbear of mine is the wearing of double-cuffed shirts with casual trousers – especially jeans. It is a violation of logic. The degree of effort required to fasten cuffs with a silver (or, in some regrettable cases, gold, crested or even jewelled) chain-linked cuff-link jars violently with the casual aesthetic of the jeans. The wearer wants to be thought of as casual - "Hey! I wear jeans! I'm hip. I'm 'with-it'." - but betrays a stunning lack of attention to detail. Frankly it's the sort of rig suitable only for a money-grubbing prime minister vacationing at a Bee Gee's holiday home, and need not concern serious-minded types such as ourselves.

(In fact, a good guide to informal dressing is to search for 'tony blair holiday' on Google Images and do the exact opposite of whatever turns up.)

A similar absurdity is the laboured informality of wearing a suit without a tie - or even without socks. The tieless look is much favoured by the Eton Grocer (H/T James Delingpole) and his alleged Conservative Party, populated exclusively by former PR hucksters and their bespectacled inky swot peers from think-tanks. Presumably they think it sets them apart from their 'stuffy,' 'buttoned-up' oppressed/repressed and oppressive/repressive predecessors, when in fact it makes them look like a gang of IT consultants on an overnight course at an executive conference facility near Newcastle who've just been ejected from a lapdancing club for trying to grope the hapless students being paid to simulate pleasure at the prospects of being leered at by drunken worker drones. 

Socklessness is boil-in-the-bag eccentricity which, as well as being tiresomely attention-seeking, is inconsiderate to those for whom the sight of an exposed and hairy male ankle is at best disagreeable. At least there is the possibility that those who indulge this ludicrous affectation might get blisters for their efforts. Often one finds that people practicing this also wear cufflinks. So let me get this straight: you exert yourself to put on cuff-links, but you think socks are oppressively formal. Ri-ight... That is an act of such self-skewering absurdity that they should be ignored if not actively man-handled.

In my experience, practitioners were probably the sort who, at school, wanted everyone to think they were too cool to have made any effort, but actually expended more time and energy trying to look relaxed than if they'd just put their socks on in the first place. We all know the type.

Look East? Look like a twot, more like.

In the US there is an entire folklore about shirts - I expect it started as a marketing gimmick by Brooks Brothers - covering business wear, casual wear, button-down collars, polo shirts, pockets etc. If you can find it, it is an interesting insight into the way people are told what to think; but, as with most sets of rules, they are for guidance only.

Here are a few principles:

- Stick to classic cloths, patterns and styles
- Stick to simple muted patterns: plainer shirts are more versatile and have greater longevity than 'fashionable' versions
- Avoid gimmicks like contrasting button-holes or fancy collar and cuff linings. That sort of thing is classic 'Look-at-me Piglet' behaviour
- Don't wear a shirt darker than the cloth of the suit you are wearing...
- ... and don't wear a shirt darker than the tie with which you will wear it
- Stick to good-quality English shirtmakers, and, once you understand the grammar of the well-made shirt, you can make more educated assessments of alternative manufacturers if you want to go off-piste

The 'Jermyn Street' shirt
The traditional shirt  will be made from natural fibres - two-fold cotton poplin being the standard and will have:
- a multi-piece collar (usually described as 'two-piece' to distinguish from the 'rollover' collar, but in fact the collars of good shirts will consist of about fifteen separate pieces of cloth)
- Removable collar bones
- A split, two-piece yoke (the panel across the shoulders)
- A turned placket (the bit at the front through which the buttons protrude)
- Mother of pearl buttons
- Two shoulder pleats
- Generous tails (for tucking in, and providing additional cloth of similar age and wear when turning collars and/or cuffs)
- The 'butterfly gusset,' which is more complicated to make and stronger than the alternatives

All patterns will be matched at the seams.

Other smaller details:
- Typically there is an additional lateral line of stitching on the inside of the collar, to maintain the shape
- The parallel rows of stitching on the placket will be set much further in from the edge, running much closer to the button-holes
- The collar stitching will be inset by about 1/4"

A warning
Unlike wine, cheese or meat pies, there is no discernible mystical effect of terroir on the manufacture of shirts. The same is true of bespoke tailoring, of course, but far-sighted tailors have founded the Savile Row Bespoke Association to protect the Savile Row and bespoke terms from the depredations of modern menswear retailers who offer perverted and sub-standard forms of 'bespoke' tailoring that really does violence to the concept. All Savile Row Bespoke members must sign up to the terms of the charter, and one of them is that they must make their stuff 'on the row'.

Sadly, in spite of the odd outburst of enthusiasm, there is no trades guild that protects the Jermyn Street name or brand. No such rule about location could practically be applied - there is not enough space to carve out workrooms, and commercial rents in St James's would prohibit the necessary expansion for all but the richest firms. As a result, the term 'Jermyn Street' and 'shirtmaker' is open to some serious abuse. To be sure, while the best shirtmakers retain factories in Britain - notably in Kent, Gloucestershire or Aldergrove in Northern Ireland - and all their bespoke work will be done by hand, it is not done 'on the street'. Moreover, many retailers calling themselves 'Jermyn Street shirtmakers' do not make their stuff in the EU, let alone the UK. In fact, if 'Jermyn Street shirtmaker' has no fixed definition, the term 'made in England' is an equally elastic concept, and could easily refer to a shirt made almost entirely in Indonesia, with only the buttons added in England.

Now, there is nothing wrong with cutting manufacturing costs and passing them on to the customer (or consumer). But it is one thing to seek economies, and another to insult the intelligence of prospective clients. As a rule, for all the waffle about 'highest standards' and 'traditional craftmanship,' unless the shirtmaker specifically states that their work is done in the UK, it almost certainly won't be. So these 'traditional English shirtmakers' are exhibiting at best a tangential relationship with the truth, and should more accurately be described simply as 'shirt shops in England'.

It is now acceptable for retailers to sell 'bespoke' shirts that really strain at the boundaries of the meaning of the term. These will, in a low light, with the sun behind them, to the untutored eye appear to resemble a traditional Jermyn Street shirt. However, these will almost invariably be made in a piss-soaked sweatshop, by a semi-trained worker, finished to low standards and will be prone to disintegrate after even the lightest ironing.

Cost versus value
It is still generally true that you get what you pay for - up to a point: I contend there is a sort of 'zone of value,' and, for basic ready-made shirts you almost certainly have to spend not less that £60 to get a good-quality, English-made example. Anything less (and I'm looking at you, Mr Lewin, Mr Fuckwhitt) will certainly involve compromises, of cloth, craftsmanship, source, finish or longevity. However, if you spend more than £120 on ready-made shirts you are unlikely to get a shirt that is twice as good. If you are getting four shirts for £100, ask yourself what the catch is. (Of course, you might not see it as a 'catch'. But then if you care so little for your accoutrements you are hardly likely to have read this far. Now are you?)

Beyond £100, the relationship between outlay and quality goes haywire; and if you buy from a non-specialist  but well-known 'fashion designer' you might pay much more for a vastly inferior item.

This cost-benefit analysis will with time be influenced by matters of personal preference. Hilditch and Key are a proper shirt-maker who make excellent quality shirts in England and they can be bought for £85. However, the fit and the style are not to my taste; so, if I were to buy ready-made shirts, I would rather have three shirts from Turnbull than four from Hilditch.

Most shirtmakers' ready-made stock caters for the ampler figure of the sedentary worker or the never-knowingly-under-victualled habitues of clubland: the body of the ready-made shirt will billow somewhat if, like me, you are of a fairly slim build. If you cannot bear the sight of the folds of cloth gathering at your waistband, your first recourse need not, however, be to engage a bespoke consultation. Several of the better shirtmakers do 'slim fit' shirts, of which Hilditch and Key and Emma Willis are the standouts; and Turnbull and Asser's standard shirts have a slightly more tailored finish than many; and most shirtmakers still offer a 'stock special' option, whereby a narrower, though still standard, body can be achieved.Whatever some French chemisiers might assert, Jermyn Street remains ground zero for bespoke and traditional ready-to-wear shirts. There are other places to buy good-quality shirts, to be sure, but this is the place to start.