Dress Shirts
Life can be tough when you’re a detail-oriented guy. You see things that other people don’t see. You’re bothered by things that most people never notice. You spend time on details that no one would ever think of spending time on.
Last month, I embarked on a month-long quest to find the perfect dress shirt. It was a quest filled with ups and downs, frustrations, anxiousness and, ultimately, some gratification.
My main issue with dress shirts is that most are cut too wide for most skinnier people. There’s just so much overhang under the arms and in the back that normal dress shirts look almost parachute-like on anyone that has less than a squarish build. Neck and sleeve lengths notwithstanding, dress shirts suffer from same problem that haunts little leaguers and their jerseys and college students and the free t-shirts they get at job fairs: the shirts are cut in a way that fits the most people, yet the cut flatters almost nobody.
For someone detail-oriented, this just doesn’t cut it. Anyone who thinks this isn’t obvious only needs to pull out a fine menswear advertisement and look closely at all of the good-looking models. None of them wear parachutes. Those guys aren’t cool-looking just because they’re attractive or because the craftsmanship of the shirt is better (although these aspects are certainly contributing factors). In my opinion, the biggest reason that these models look so good is that the clothes fit them properly. Lost amongst the production and glitz of the ad is the fact that finding any clothing (in this case, dress shirts) that fits properly is a matter of patience and determination more than it is a function of cost.
That being said, I spent the last month trying on almost every sub-$80 dress shirt sold at any reputable store in the area. Every guy should do something like this. If you try on a series of shirts, you realize little things because you have a means to compare. Some shirts are embarrassingly wide; I was swimming in them even though they were the proper neck and sleeve measurements. Some shirts, on the other hand, were incredibly slim. I’m not a big guy, but there are some shirts out there that are “heroin-addict/impossibly skinny euroman” slim. I couldn’t breathe in those.
I ended up not finding a shirt in any store that fit all of my criteria. Finally, I went on the Internet and, having read the measurements of their ‘slim but not that slim” shirt, I ordered some. After three weeks, the shirts arrived from the UK. I’d say it was 90% of what I wanted. Not bad.
Herea were my criteria, in no particular order:
- Slim fit – meaning the chest buttons had to be on the edge of straining when I inhaled fully, but no more
- Point collar with a width, at the widest point, of 2.5 inches
- Spread collar with an angle between the two collars of roughly 90 degrees, no more or less
- 2nd button from the neck can’t be within 1 inch of the uppermost button
- Stitching on collar more than 2 millimeters from border of the collar
- In additition to white, manufacturer had to make a very light blue option. Not royal blue. Not sky blue. A very light blue.
Someday, I’d like to get around this problem by having my shirts custom made. But in the meantime, this is the way that a details freak has to buy dress shirts. There is no other way.
And now you know why Susan is afraid to buy me clothes.