Rejoice! Proper Cloth Has Restored Its Best Collar

Proper Cloth is a modern miracle. In a sea of online MTM shirt companies who promise to let you design your own shirt and have it made to fit you perfectly, it stands out for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, their user experience (UX) is out of this world. The website has been honed to make it easy to navigate, easy to understand what you’re doing and why, and to help you through the process of ordering exactly what you want. Almost every detail has been considered: Outstanding, high-resolution photos of every fabric, each with its own page giving consistent quality information and reviews from previous customers who bought that fabric; A host of useful filters for finding fabrics exactly like you want; The step-by-step walkthrough of each measurement you take and exactly how to do it; Fabric swatches you can order to handle a cloth in person; High-resolution images of every collar from multiple angles both with a tie and without; Just to name a few.

Secondly, though, is their provenance in the golden era of #menswear, and the resulting selection of large, glorious shirt collars available. My body type isn’t particularly hard to fit in ready-to-wear, so for me personally, going custom is almost entirely about being able to make a shirt with a super great shirt collar (and secondarily, about being able to get a shirt in a certain fabric on demand). I love the big, bold Italian collars found on famous makers like Finamore or Borrelli. Those makers are hard to buy where I live, and because of the way wholesale accounts work, it’s not a guarantee you’ll find the unfiltered Italian product anyhow because the makers have had to adapt to local tastes based on sales figures given them from retail stores. But thanks to Proper Cloth’s coming of age a decade+ ago when those big, bold Italian styles were pre-eminent, they have a handful of collar designs with the Italian character I am so smitten with.

In contrast, other online MTM stores usually have a half dozen or maybe more collars all with about 3-inch point lengths at various degrees of spread and various internal constructions (fused or unfused). Only Spier & Mackay’s custom shirt program has a bigger selection of giant, Italian collars available by default (of the shops I’ve come across, that is). But unfortunately, their UX is terrible.

I’m writing this post, however, to commemorate Proper Cloth’s best collar’s (the Soft Roma Cutaway) return from a dark period into the light. From its origination sometime in the early 2010s until around 2017, the soft Roma cutaway was a perfect, Italian collar with a tall collar band, very long collar points and a generous spread (but without being so cut away as to be ridiculous). It had no tie space, either.

But for some reason, in 2017, the powers that be changed the collar’s dimensions and shortened the lengths by about 1/8″. Which sounds insignificant. But in practice, it kneecapped the collar, turning it from something unique and iconic into something mainstream and boring. They also added 1/4″ tie space. What’s worse, they never updated the images of the collar, giving a misleading perspective on what to expect when you ordered a shirt. I have a few shirts made from that era, and the changes they made almost turned me off buying from PC entirely (what stopped me were the still-excellent Ivy button-down collar, and my experiments with the Milano collar).

However, with my latest purchase from the company, I’m overjoyed to say they’ve restored the Soft Roma Cutaway nearly to its former glory. The collar points are once again back to their full length. The other aspects are still there: the tall collar band and the wide spread (though it’s a tiny bit less spread than it was originally; that, however, is truly not noticeable in practice). The 1/4″ tie space is still there, which I don’t love, but that’s something you can kind of just cinch your tie down a little tighter to make disappear.

The shirt I ordered is one of their washed indigo shirts, which I made the same as the one I’d made for my wife recently—same chambray fabric, same Western style pockets, same large corozo buttons. The only design difference between ours is that I put the smallest collar they have on hers (the straight point), and I went with the soft Roma cutaway on mine.

See my guide to making the most from your Proper Cloth order to see my other recommendations for the methods I favor when ordering a new Proper Cloth shirt. Use my referral link for 10% off your first shirt purchase.

Thank you Proper Cloth and the crew for restoring your best collar!

I made an Instagram Reel to showcase the collar’s update and show a couple examples from when it had changed.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Mitchell Moss (@menswearmusings)

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