Who invented dress shirts

In large part thanks to the perspicacity of Ukrainian immigrant maker Bernard Gantmacher, provider of shirts to the campus shop at Yale in the s, the Ivy Leaguers soon followed, as part of a broader mode of East Coast nonchalance epitomised by John F. British youth cults ranging from the mods who often opted for small-collared pieces with a button on the back of the collar to the Madchester rock-rave fusionists via the Skinheads and the Two Tones, meanwhile, have popularised them back across The Pond where Brooks made his now historic observation.

Worn with a loosened tie, top button undone, the button-down exudes has a strong whiff of Rat Pack style pickled nonchalance par excellence, while Chet Baker carried off Oxford cloth button-downs with short sleeves and narrow ties with dashing results. Victorian men were also known to buy celluloid or paper collars to save money. However, due to the laborious process of refitting the collars on the shirts, the development of the domestic washing machine, and developments in fabric technology, the detachable collar has all but disappeared from the male wardrobe.

Shirts made to be worn with formal attire were traditionally cut with a stiff wing collar in the late nineteenth century, and that style remained standard into the period after World War I.

The Duke of Windsor developed the move to a pleated front formal shirt with a turned-down collar in the s. The Duke explained to his shirt maker that he wanted a softer alternative to the stiff-winged collar shirt. The pleated front of the dress shirt is designed not to extend below the waist, so that the front will not bulge forward when the wearer sits down. The wing collar remains the more formal of the two styles and usually comes in reinforced pique and sometimes with a fly front to conceal the buttons.

The wing-collared shirt remains the more flattering to those with long necks and the preferred choice for their partners by women. By the late s there was a trend in evening shirts toward more ornate styles. Almost-feminine dress shirts, with huge ruffles, horizontal pleats, embroidery, and lace all featured, were finished off with mandarin collars and a variety of new colors.

This trend carried on until the s, but such ostentation is considered a sartorial blunder in the early s, and most men have reverted to the more traditional styles in white fabrics. An interesting trend that developed during the s was the adoption of the dress shirt by women, who wore it both formally to black tie events and as an item of casual wear.

This trend has all but vanished. The formal dress shirt had hitherto been an entirely masculine item of dress, though in the s some women who adopted the tailored styles of the New Woman also wore blouses that somewhat resembled men's formal shirts.

A dress shirt in the United States is considered to be any shirt with a collar attachable or detachable that is worn with a jacket and a tie. This includes both the wing-collared and turned-down collared shirts worn by men as evening wear, but these are referred to as formal shirts. Styles of American dress shirts include pinned, button-down, Barrymore, plain, or tab-collared shirts.

Here were the male style setters of the s. They were influenced again from England by the then young Prince of Wales, who had picked up a love of relaxed American clothing on his tours of the US in the early s. The photographs of him mixing sportswear into formal events and his Palm Beach casual wear served to popularise what became know as the Ivy League.

Ivy peaked post war in the s with the GI Bill and the large increase in college students. Brooks Brothers innovated, being the first to introduce the pink button down shirt which was a radical move at a time when men wore mainly white and blue.

This was also the period where the industrial sewing machine design peaked and has never really been bettered. Companies like Union Special made machines like the single needle armhole that we at Triplstitched still use. This association with ideals of steadfastness was also played out in the fictional American advertising creation of the Arrow Collar Man , with his rigid white shirt, promoting American masculine ideals.

The next significant change for the white dress shirt was the introduction of synthetic fabrics, with questionable ability for comfort, in the late s and early s.

Then in the late s and early s an escalation of floridity occurred, in particular, frontal flounces and ruffles, as well as increased collar widths. In the early s, for a brief period, an innovative romantic style of dressing with loosely styled foppish and frilled white dress shirts was the height of fashion — influenced by popular new romantic bands, such as British band Spandau Ballet.

Next time you walk through a department store, and glance at the rows of intricately folded and exactingly boxed white dress shirts, you can pause to consider the important historical connections. Are you an academic or researcher?