‘I fell in love with a collar shape that was slightly oversized, elegant in a retro kind of way, unfussy yet quirky’
Your collar, like your accent, instantly places you. It says something about who you are before you open your mouth. It’s a fashion judgment almost as old as the hills. Long before there were new-season It bags, there was white collar and blue collar, and – arguably the daddy of all fashion statements – the flash of white on a dog collar. A neatly pressed collar is such a powerful message of conservatism that you can give your look a subversive edge just by swerving it: a collarless grandad style immediately relocates a shirt from office to artist’s studio. Pop the collar upwards on a classic blazer and your look switches from Sloane Square to Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
All this is a justification for the fact that I’ve spent 10 months – not full-time, but in more idle moments than I care to admit – trying to figure out a name for the style of collar I’m wearing today. In March last year, at Nicolas Ghesquière’s first Louis Vuitton catwalk show, I fell in love with a collar shape that was slightly oversized, elegant in a retro kind of way, unfussy yet quirky. At Vuitton it came in contrasting colours on leather jackets and belted coats; since then, it has been infiltrating the fashion world. But what’s it called? I tried “donkey jacket collar”, but that’s ugly and sounds like a terrible party game. I experimented with “denim jacket collar”, but that was confusing. Square collar? Big square? Don’t think whoever came up with Farrow & Ball’s Elephant’s Breath and Lamp Room Gray was quaking in their boots.
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