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Fit To Be Tied
| Article
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16181 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1989 |
1,227 Words |
| Author
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Christine Liemandt Maddux
Christine Liemandt Maddux is a free-lance writer based in
Minneapolis. |
By noon on any working day, men are tugging at their ties and loosening their collars. Faced with a lifetime of wearing dress shirts and ties, most men in business and the professions regard the sartorial convention as something between irksome and torturous. This predicament can often be deterred by the apparently simple matter of choosing the correct shirt and tie.
Collars: Fit first, style second
A man shopping for shirts is like a woman shopping for a dress. Both cite the size they were at the close of their formative years, clinging to it as a holy truth, and turn their attention to matters of style. Oddly enough, this need to defend the status quo can override the knowledge that one had gained a goodly amount of weight and that the expanding self is chafing under the deceit.
In his book The Executive Look, Custom Shop founder Mortimer Levitt says that new customers for his custom-made shirts reported that their shirts were strangling them. They selected one thousand first-order customers at random and checked their ready-made size (that is, the size they had been buying) against the collar size Levitt's company measured for them. The orders showed that there was an average increase in collar size from their previous measurement of three-quarters of an inch.
Since Levitt owns more than eighty Custom Shops across the United States, it is no surprise to learn that he believes, "The one article of clothing that will change your appearance more radically than anything else you own is a shirt collar that has been fitted to four dimensions instead of the usual two."
The manager of Levitt's Minneapolis store, David Rhinevault, explains that besides being the right neck circumference, a proper collar must be the correct back height, front height, and style. "More linen showing at the back of the neck is fashionable," says Rhinevault, "and we can adjust the collar height up for a long neck or down for a short neck, to make them appear normal."
The same idea applies to front collar height, which should rise to hide a man's jowls as he ages.
The fourth dimension, the collar style, is a matter of fashion and physiognomy. As Coty Award-winning fashion designer Alan Flusser writes in his book Clothes and the Man, the collar style "sets the tone
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