Shirtmaker

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The Kent shirtmaker. Just about the last of its kind. It stands at the top of a quiet road on a leafy hill, in a Victorian-era workhouse, somewhere in the middle of Kent, twenty miles outside London. Here, over three narrow floors, shirts of imperious quality are cut, sewn, and finished by hand.

Master shirtmaker, Kent Made in England

They do good shirts in Kent; very good shirts. The perfect shirt is a fictional notion — a mirage of the trade — but they get as close to it here as anywhere. Shirts are all they do. Not all shirts — baulking as they do at the idea of raglan sleeves — but if it has a collar, yoke, sleeves with cuffs, and a full placket, this is the place.

Master shirtmaker, Kent Made in England

And, as mentioned above, they make shirts very well. Decade after decade of making one and only one thing, again and again, with precision and care and quality always paramount, makes for shirtmaking expertise unmatched anywhere in the country; expertise on the manifold exactitudes that make or break a shirt, and on concerns imperceptible to most, on forensic-type nuances. How many stitches per inch are required to balance shape and structure. How much fusing is needed to make a particular type of collar stiff, but not too stiff. How some cloths are more giving — a pinpoint cotton over a poplin cotton, for instance — and how others need discipline. Nuances that elevate a good shirt to a sublime standard.

The premises are no wider than five steps across, all pleasingly creaky and akilter. Character and traditions are palpable. The Kent shirtmaker, indeed, is a place of grand tradition, and is now home to a hardened team of workers who practice them today; each of them a specialist of a single and highly specific aspect of shirt-

Master shirtmaker, Kent Made in England

-making. In one room a Savile Row-schooled cutter. In another two rows of machinists putting a run of poplin shirts through the line. And in another room still another cutter, this time puzzling over an apparently treacherous design.

The shirtmaker has been on this site, its only site, since the early 1900s. Operations are smaller than they once were, but the shirtmaker outlives many of the once-venerable names for whom it has made, and is still the go-to for dozens of estimable establishments for whose customers hand-made English shirts are the only type they wear. To the shirtmaker, they’re mostly just names. Bright-eyed creative whippersnapper or establishment wheezer, it matters not. Amid the grand flashy entrances of the trade, the unending stream of hyperbole, the shirtmaker just keeps ticking quietly on. Removed from the limelight, it does what it does, strives daily to improve output by infinitesimal degrees, and works with those who know the value of what it does. With the Kent shirtmaker, everyone walks away with a good shirt.