LIFESTYLE - Men’s Dress Shirt Collar Overview

Men’s Dress Shirt Collar Overview

BY ANTONIO

Men’s Dress Shirt Collar Overview – Video Guide – Point – Spread – Pin – Tab – Button Down Collars

Men’s Dress Shirt Collar Overview Guide Video – Point Collars – Spread Collars – Button Down Collars – Pin Collars – Tab Collars – Wing Collars – Dress Shirt Button Down Collars

RAW Transcript

Men’s Dress Shirt Collar Overview – Video Guide – Point – Spread – Pin – Tab – Button Down Collars

[0:00:00]
Hi. I’m Antonio Centeno, the founder of Real Men Real Style. And today I’m going to be giving you a dress shirt collar overview.

Okay. So why is this important? Why do you need to know anything about dress shirt collars? Well if you think about it, the dress shirt sits right next to your face and in many ways it frames the face. Kind of like how a picture frame frames a picture. And if you’ve ever seen that bad picture frame, it just really did track from the picture and it takes away from it. That’s why museums, they spend so much time making sure that this is set up correctly.

And so why would you put something next to your face which makes it look wider, makes it look thinner? You know, it changes the look. Actually me wearing a white shirt collar and white shirt in general, this affects how my face is perceived. And it draws actually, very – it’s a stark contrast between my skin color and this jacket color, and it draws attention to this area.

So that’s just, you know, I pay attention on those things. And I want to teach you how to pay attention to this. So today we’re going to talk specifically about the styles, not about the colors. And I talk about other things like this throughout my websites. So go ahead and go back to Real Men Real Style and see what you can find there. We’re trying to make it pretty well-organized for you.

But let’s talk about shirt collar styles, specifically what are they? So we’ve got turndown collars, and you’ve winged collars. Those are the two main classes of shirts. We’re not going to spend any time really talking about winged collars because those are mostly for black tie and white tie. And you’ve rarely ever see those in the United States and really throughout the world nowadays.

What you see everywhere are turndown collars. And there are varieties of turndown collars. Mostly, they’re affected by the angle in which – if I were to button this, or I would button my shirt right here, it would be the angle in which the points go out.

And first let’s talk about point collars. So what are point collars? They’re the most common shirt collar on the planet. They’re – if you walk into any department store, box store, pretty much you’re looking at point collars. And these are collars who the points at the end are, I would say, 60 degrees or less, probably around, maybe even 70 degrees or less, it depends on where you’re at. Over in England, we’re going to see a few more spread. There are going to be a little bit more spread out than in the United States.

But point collars, and the reason they’re so common is because they’re very flexible. They go with almost any type. But the big thing about the point collar is it’s going to elongate the face. And for many men, this is actually the most complementary collar. Because they want something that, if they got a round face, or something that’s slightly square, they want it to draw out their face a bit.

Now, that’s not saying that other types of collars aren’t great for you. But that’s really why you’re going to see mostly point collars out there. In addition, it’s just safe. It’s going to work with many types. But you can play with those points. Not necessarily you’re going to have to look for specialty collars and actually ask for spread collars if you want to get the angles to go out.

And that takes us to our next collar type which is, whenever the collar point starts to go out beyond 90 degrees or 90 degrees or more, that’s a spread collar. And they’re a lot less common. And the reason being is that they sort of spread out the face which isn’t good if you’ve got a round face or square face. But if you have a really long narrow face, you got a rectangle-shaped face or just something that you really want to draw out those features, that’s when you want to go for a spread collar.

In addition, I like what I call the medium spread. And this is one that we’ve designed. It’s about 70 – around 75 degrees. So it’s a little bit, you know, it’s not a full spread in terms of 90 to 100 degrees. It’s a medium spread. And I like it because whenever I do not wear a neck tie, the point stay out of the way. So a lot of point collars, whenever you wear, they’re maybe even worn with a neck tie. And so when you don’t wear them with a neck tie, you end up getting – these collar points end up getting in the way.

So we’ve talked about point collars, we’ve talked about spread collars. And understand that each of those types, you can have narrow-point collars. And this is where the angle starts to come in. I mean I’ve seen – have you ever seen the movie Goodfellas? Joe Pesci – so I’ll just put Joe his name, he’s got that really, really narrow – I’ve actually made collars like this before. But I’ve had some people say they’re monstrosities, maybe for this article I’ll go ahead and put one of those out there.

But the point I’m making is that you can have a lot of fun with collars. Now as a custom clothier, I can do this on any of the collars. If you’re going to be looking for something off the rack, you need to just look in and ask about it. Hopefully,

[0:05:00]
…the manufacturer will specify as to what type of collar is.

You also seen sometimes called – I don’t know, people will – certain manufacturers will make up the names for them. And that, I’m not a big fan of that because I’ll set and takes out – it makes it unique yes to that company but all of the sudden, I’m trying to figure out, “Okay. What is that layer?” Or I don’t know, whatever they call it.

Now, button-down collars. These are actually probably more common than spread collars. And they were developed by – or they become famous with Brooks brothers. I believe they came off as rugby shirts and they used to button their collars down so that they would basically stay out of the way and wouldn’t pop up. And Brooks brothers took this to a whole another level. They introduced a dress shirt with a button-down soft collar.

And this is something that – I mean there are stories of people coming over from England, France and just going specifically to Brooks brothers and just tucking up because they love, they’re making this collar and the way it was shaped. Now, you can buy them all over the world. As a custom clothier, we make them as well.

But you’re going to find that button-down collars are – because of the button, they are more casual. They’re nice because they’re lower maintenance. You don’t always have to – you still want to unbutton it and iron them and press out the point, but you don’t have to. It’s understood that it’s a little bit softer of a collar.

You can wear a tie with button-down. Some men say that you shouldn’t. I said that you can. You know, just unbutton it, tie the tie, and then button it. It looks fine. Or you can do I guess – you know, some men thinks it’s a little style feature to leave one of them unbuttoned or leave both of them. I don’t know. I don’t really own many button-like shirts. I’m – like I said, a bigger fan of the medium spread point and I used collar stays.

So we’ve talked about the point, the spread, the button-down. By the way, the button-down is a variation of the point collar. So you’re going to seen on button-downs that they are usually 75 to 70 degrees or more narrow. Probably I think we make ours around 60 to 55 degrees.

The pin collar. Now the pin collar, the tab collar, the club collar. These are what I would consider to be eccentric collars. I sell a lot of shirts. And probably 1% of the shirt I sell are these eccentric groups. And these are ones, when you see them, there’s something unique about it. I mean you rarely ever see them out in the wild. So let’s talk about each of them.

The pin collar. The c-collar that actually has a hole in the collar and is made for a pin to be inserted. Now there are none true, there were men who actually, will use a big – it looks like a big safety pin and they will run them to a regular collar and you know, kind of create a pin collar. But a true pin collar actually has holes and it’s designed for a pin that will go through and screw in usually on the sides to hold it there and fasten it.

An interesting thing about this is from the side, it will actually push out a tie and it creates a very unique look. You have to have cojones to wear this. I think it would be in a finance industry or I don’t know, be the head of Goldman Sachs or something.

So let’s talk about the tab collar. The tab collar is one that rides a bit higher up on the neck. Sometimes it has two buttons. And it’s a bit stuffy over the collar. So it’s going to have a shorter collar – the length right here, of this collar point, right here and the distance right there is going to be shorter. And so a tab collar is made to be worn. And it just looks like a bit stuffier of a collar. It’s going to fit – it’s not going to have as long of points going down. And that’s a tab collar. It’s always worn with a tie. It’s just a more formal kind of a stuffy-looking collar in my opinion but some men like it.

All right. The club collar. The club collar is going to have rounded edges. And this I think has bit of origins — and English school boys used to wear collars like this. And you will see a number of gentlemen who will try to pull this off. And I think it looks pretty good. It definitely, when you see it, it is an acquired taste. I mean because you don’t have the points here which you have again is a rounded edge, and so naturally it’s going to be a bit shorter. And the angle, it’s usually more of towards the point. So ,75 to 60 degrees.

All right. so we’ve talked about point collars, we’ve talked about spread collars, we’ve talked about button-down collars, we’ve talked about pin, tab, and club collars. Did I forget anything? Probably hidden button-down. I don’t really get into that. But that’s a variation of the button-down where you can’t see the button, it’s underneath. I make those for a number of my clients as well.

And you know, when it comes down to collars and what you can do, it’s really up to your imagination. I’m a big fan though of keeping it simple, keeping it classic and realizing that because it’s in such close proximity to your face, I realize that you don’t want it to be something that draws all the attention. It’s great if it draws…

[0:10:00]
….attention to your face because that’s where you want people’s eyes.

But when your collar starts to draw attention away, that’s when I think it almost defeats the purpose of what it’s there for.

All right. Antonio Centeno. Thank you for your time and check out the website. Bye-bye.

[0:10:17] End of Audio