Men today, especially young men, can obsess about the fit of the shirt body. Often they want it to be racy, not billowing at the waist.

If you don’t wear a tie, or often leave your jacket behind, I understand the shirt body focus.

However, if your wear a tie and keep your jacket on at many occasions, the collar arrangement and the shirt fit around the shoulders and upper chest become way more important than a snug fit around the waist.

Personally:

• I want the yoke and upper shirt on front and back to lie flat from collar onwards. A shirt body and a collar fighting each other undermines elegance. A typical problem, when shirt and collar don’t find harmony, is the v-fold just below the collar band on the front, when you have tied your tie.
• I want the collar points to reach the jacket lapels being slightly covered by them. It depends on the collar, of course. A club collar is not included.
• I want the shirt knot in a size that fits collar band and tie space. It brings unrest, if the knot is higher than the collar band.

The design of a collar in itself is important too. Like Alan Flusser preaches, I believe that a low collar doesn’t serve a long neck and vice versa. Yet, unlike Alan Flusser I don’t subscribe to the idea that a narrow face should not use a pointed collar, or that a broad face will become even broader by a spread collar. I think the design of jacket shoulders and lapels is much more important in that regard.

Photography: Sartorial Notes

PS
Sven Raphael Schneider of the large Gentleman’s Gazette just included Sartorial Notes on a list of “Top 10 Classic Men’s Style Blogs” calling Sartorial Notes “unique quality content”. I thank him for that. Sven adds that Sartorial Notes is “updated less frequently”, which is totally true.  Let me say, I would love to post more often and extensively, yet I struggle to find time for that. I have a full-time job, a family, and I write a lot in Danish, for instance on the Danish version of Sartorial Notes and a blog that I have on Dagbladet Børsen, the leading financial newspaper in Denmark. As you know, I also run a webshop, although I’m scaling that down.