Button-down shirt in natural-white stripe linen

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Garment

£140.00

Shirt, made in London, with natural and white striped linen from the south coast of Ireland, and light horn buttons from the West Midlands.

Sizing

The shirt has a standard shape — not fitted, not loose — and fits true to size. However, with linen, it is worth thinking about going one size down, because — linen being linen — it has a natural tendency to drape away from the body. For this reason, the mannequin, who is the most standard 38 in the world, wears an XS.

XS S M L XL
To fit chest 36 38 40 42 44
Collar 14 14½ 15 15½ 16
Pit-to-pit 19 20 21 22 23
Shoulder 17 17½ 18 18½ 19
Sleeves 24 24½ 25 25½ 26
Back length 28½ 28½ 29 29½ 30
Image of the Button-down shirt in natural-white stripe linen
What you have here is a shirt with a straight-cut body, medium length, and a button-down collar. The collar is a mite smaller than most, and has curved edges. The collar buttons are positioned high, such that, when fastened, there is a satisfying bulge around the collar — what some call the "collar roll".
At the chest, on the left-side as worn, the shirt has a pocket with a narrow pen, pencil, or scalpel compartment. Strengthening stitches appear on the corners of the pocket, and at the top of the aforementioned compartment, to add further durability should the pocket be in heavy, regular, use.
The shirt has a front of eight bona-fide horn buttons. Being as they are an entirely natural thing, each looks different to the next, varying in tone and hue and striatic markings. The cuffs (below) have curved corners, and each has two buttons (in the image below, the tightest of these buttons is fastened).
The shirt has French seams — uncommon for a shirt: it takes more time and is more tricky to accomplish. The benefit: it makes seams much stronger, and thus the shirt much more long-lasting. It also looks better, with a satisfyingly thick seam on the outside, and the most tidy appearance within.
The shirt is made with linen from a mill in Ireland. Uncommonly fine linen, this. Not only does it drape better and crease less than most linen, it has a remarkably soft and comfortable handle. Then there's its appearance: a flecked base of natural-coloured linen, with a faint double-stripe scrawled through it.

As worn

The gent here is 5'9" and is wearing size S. He has a chest size of 38", and there are reports — neither confirmed nor denied — that he weighs in just below 12 stone.

Makers of

The shirt is made by a small shirt workroom in north-east London. They make shirts and only shirts all day, every day, and as such have developed something of a knack for it. They make with tricky but strength-giving French seams, and an out-of-vogue dedication to older "how shirts used to be made" contraptions.
The linen is made by a small mill on the south coast of Ireland. The reason this stuff sits so high above the run of common linen is the exceptional quality of yarn, the unique family weaving patterns, and the rigorous finishing — softening, scouring, and tumbling — undertaken when the cloth leaves the loom.
The horn buttons are cut, shaped, and polished by the last such factory in Britain. It continues a tradition in the Midlands, first linked to the area's meat markets, in the 18th century. "It is no easy task," said William Hutton in 1780, "to enumerate the infinite diversity of buttons here in Birmingham."