Men's Dress Shirts - Shirt Style Details (Collars, Cuffs, Pockets, Etc)

Over the past half-century, the dress shirt has gone from being an undergarment to holding a prominent place in many outfits. This is one suspect why it is today ready in so many styles, colors, and patterns. Either one's style is chinos or suit-and-tie, shirts are an principal means of expanding one's wardrobe.

A shirt's style signals quite a bit about the wearer's intentions. A dress shirt with a button-down collar, left breast pocket, plain front, and single-button cuffs signals freedom while a dress shirt with a turned-down point collar, no breast pocket, placket front, and French cuffs signals formality. The attractiveness of adjusting a shirt's style is that you can make it for not only for the opening but also to compliment your unique features.

Sweaters Style Casual

Shirt Collars

The men's dress shirt collar is the most prominent style detail, both in determining the garment's level of formality and in how it flatters the wearer's face. Button-down collars are the least formal and highly versatile; they look great without a tie but can just as well reserve a tie and sweater, blazer, or sport coat combination. The wing collar, on the other hand, is reserved for formal wear and should always be worn with its companion parts. It is the least versatile collar, whose sole purpose is to signal the highest level of dress.

Most men's dress shirts sport some sort of pointed collar, but there is huge room for range here. While the standard point collar looks good on most men, those with narrower faces do good with slightly shorter ones, while round faces carry well above long collar points. As a general rule, the greater the angle between the short sides of the collar points, the more formal the presentation. Spread collars, which leave a wide opening between them, take large tie knots especially well. The edges of the cut-away collar nearly form a level line above the tie knot; this is the most formal collar arrangement. An irregularity to the parallelism of spread and formality is the tab collar: here dinky tabs of fabric extending from each side associate behind the tie knot, holding the collar close together and projecting the knot outward for a precise, no-nonsense look. The white contrast collar, in any style, with or without matching white French cuffs, is a favorite of power-dressers. While it easily raises a suit-and-tie above the masses, let the wearer be warned against it if he cannot equal its eminence.

On most decent dress shirts, the collar's points are kept level by collar stays. These 2- to 3-inch pointed splints are inserted into slots on the underside of the collar after ironing, and later removed for washing. Besides the plastic ones that come with most shirts, you can buy them in brass, silver, and even ivory, but their material has negligible result on their function.

Shirt Cuffs

Barrel cuffs, standard on most dress shirts, come in a range of styles and except for the most formal of occasions are never a bad choice. The base range has a single button; cuffs with two or even three buttons are somewhat more artful. French cuffs are de rigeur for formal wear; they look good with a suit but are always optional. A button in the sleeve placket helps the sleeve to stay closed while wear and can be opened to iron the cuffs; it is elective but nearly ubiquitous.

Shirt Pockets

The former left breast pocket adds a dinky depth to a dress shirt, especially if worn without jacket and tie, and can be useful for holding pens, tickets, and the like. A shirt with no pockets can look slightly cleaner with a coat and tie, but since the coat covers the pocket the contrast is minimal when wearing a suit. As with most things, simplicity equals formality, so the pocket-less shirt is the dressiest.

Shirt Front & The Placket

The standard placket is a strip of fabric raised off the men's dress shirt front with stitches down each side; this is what most casual shirts and many dress shirts have. In the more contemporary French placket, the edge of the shirt front is folded over, creased, and held together only by the button holes. This cleaner front sharpens more formal dress shirts; it should not, however, be combined with a button-down collar. There are also hidden button plackets, and as the name suggests hide the front buttons under a sheath of fabric.

Shirt Back

Men's backs are not flat; thus we use pleats on the back panel of a shirt so that the fabric may hang from the yoke (the piece face the shoulder blades) and good conform to the body. There are two base varieties of pleated shirt back styles: the box pleat consists of two pleats spaced one-and-a-half inches apart at the center, while side pleats lie halfway between each edge and the center of the back. While the previous are more base on ready-to-wear shirts, the latter good align with the actual shape of the back, and thus fit most men better. A well-made custom shirt can be cut and sewn to fit its wearer perfectly without pleats, and this makes it cleaner and easier to iron. Nonetheless, many men prefer to have pleats even on their bespoke dress shirts.

Monograms

A man may elect to have his shirt monogrammed, normally on the edge of the breast pocket or on the shirt's cuff. Monogramming originated as a way to recognize one's shirts in a market laundry, akin to writing a child's name on the tag of their jacket. More recently, as the shirt has taken a more prominent role in men's dress, the monogram has emerged as a way to subtly relate the care a man has taken in obtaining his clothes. While large, garish monograms easily do more harm than good, many men enjoy the quiet display of their initials, normally in a color similar to the shirt's own.

Men's Dress Shirts - Shirt Style Details (Collars, Cuffs, Pockets, Etc)