Field shirt in cotton duck in olive drab

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£300.00 — ex VAT

Field shirt, made in London, with fairly heavy (14oz) cotton duck canvas from Lancashire, along with horn buttons from the Cotswolds.

Sizing

The field shirt fits true to size. Take the mannequin here, for instance: the most standard 40 on Earth, and wearing a size M.

XS S M L XL
To fit chest 36 38 40 42 44
Pit-to-pit 20 21 22 23 24
Back length 30 30¼ 30½ 30¾ 31
Sleeve from centre-back 34¼ 34¾ 35¼ 35¾ 36¼

The method of sleeve construction, with the sleeve cut as one continuous panel from neck to cuff, means the shoulders accommodate and drape smoothly over human contours of every shape and size — rendering a shoulder measurement both impossible and irrelevant.

The field shirt is an unstructured shirt or structured jacket, depending on where you draw the line. It is, either way, your quintessential mid-layer. It is suitable over a shirt or t-shirt — with a capacious cut in the upper body — but is unlined and bulk-free, so can be sandwiched between your shirt and jacket.
The collar of the field shirt on a full collar stand and has the general shape of a small jacket collar. It is cut to sit happily down — where a pleasing tendency to convexity is seen — or fully up, or halfway up and halfway down. There is structure enough for all and any position, and to look good all the while.
The buttons on the field shirt are horn — middling in colour and matte in finish — and each is a little different from one to the next. They are in that regard as if alpha-keratin snowflakes — such is the beauty of being a product of a high-grade natural material, rather than, say, a plastic replica.
There are two pockets on the field shirt, both at the chest. They are built into the chest-spanning seam that stems, in point of pattern-cutting fact, from the sleeve. One is a bellows patch; the other is an in-seam pocket, the stitching for which mirrors its counterpart. Bar-tacks strengthen the entranceways of both.
There's no arm or shoulder seam on the field shirt. No raglan, no in-set, no nothing. The absence of seam in the region means that the field shirt has the softest imaginable shoulder: for better or worse, it rolls over the outline of the wearer.
The cuffs on the field shirt are more coat-like in styling than shirt. They fasten with the help of an arrow-tipped tab and button. The relatively wide sleeve is pulled into this cuff with the the force of a gusset and the grace of a pleat — although the cuff is quite wide so the shirt is easily slipped off and on.
The field shirt has a curved hem that rises steeply at the side seams. The back of the body is slightly longer than the front.
This is cotton duck — the term "duck" coming from the Dutch word doek, meaning small, short-necked, large-billed waterfowl. In plain, non-Dutch terms, it is a cotton canvas of just-over middling weight, hard and firm when new, soft and ruggedly lived-in with wear, and hard-wearing throughout.

As worn

The gent here is just north of a 38 chest, with a weight of 12 stone, a height of 6ft 1in, and he is wearing the field shirt in an S.
This gentleman is standard a 38 chest as you could meet. Here, he is wearing a size S, and the fit is great.

Makers of

The field shirt is made by a coat factory in north London. Note: not a shirt factory. Rather than being made like a shirt but with heavier cloth, the field shirt is made to the same standards, and with much the same structure, as the most robust outerwear, with heavy fusing and turned seams and the like.
The cloth is sourced from a mill in Lancashire, in north-west England. Cottons have rolled off its line for nearly a century and a half. Industry-leading methods of weaving, dyeing, and finishing — unimproved in decades — along with steadfast adherence to quality, result in some truly first-rate cloth.
The horn buttons are cut, shaped, and polished by the last horn button-makers in Britain. Relocated from the Midlands to the Cotswolds, they continue a tradition going back to the 18th century. "It is no easy task," claimed William Hutton in 1780, "to enumerate the infinite diversity of buttons made in Birmingham."

So they say

I received the wool field shirt as a present. Exceptional construction and aesthetic. It is robust enough for the elements but precisely contoured for formal presentability.

A response for which you dream when gift-giving. This man received the field shirt in uniform melton in late November 2019.

I like to wear my field shirt over a shirt. Perfect fit. I like the heaviness and thickness of the linen. Simply wow. Thanks.

Spoken by a gent in Japan who bought the field shirt in very heavy linen in March 2018.