Mens clothing has adapetd over the years and tailors on Saville Row spend hours designing and making suits and shirts for all sorts of occasions. There are many different brands available including Farah Shirts that you can find on www.ejmenswear.com/men/farah/
But shirts have a longer history than many of us are probably aware of and a very interesting one as well.
The oldest shirt style artefact that is a linen shirt that is thought to date back to 3,000CBC and was found inside an Egyptian tomb. It has been incredibly well preserved, and you can still make out the basic shaping of the garment and some of the design details that would have originally been much more prominent.
In the past shirts were expensive and without the technology to wash clothing in a washing machine, keeping your clothes sparkly and bright not forgetting hygienic was a bit of a long task. This is why shirts were designed with removable collars and cuffs, as these are the areas that are more likely to get dirty and faded. This meant that a man could remove the collar and cuffs and replace them with new fresh one each day and then have the whole shirt washed once a week, which was much more realistic.
When you look at a man’s dress shirt you will see tiny buttons at the edges of the collar. These were first invented by polo players would were becoming increasingly annoyed with the collars of their clothing flapping around whilst they dashed around the polo pitch on their horses.
Waistcoats were worn as standard clothing in the past, as opposed to their position in fashion today which is for special occasions such as weddings and the realms of the businessman. If a gentleman in the past was seen wearing just a shirt and no waistcoat it was thought that he was indecently dressed, and he could be punished by law for being out in public dressed in this manner, especially is he had been seen by a group of women.
The names ‘blue collar’ and ‘white collar’ are references to the colour of the shirts and clothing that different workers wore. It was a way of distinguishing the manual labour workers from the office staff and is a term that is occasionally still used today, although not always in such glowing terms.
