Thrifted dress shirts

Bought on eBay for $13. I’m pretty sure this shirt was new old stock, never worn.

I’m retired and live in the sticks, so I haven’t fretted over dress shirts for a long time. But, in Scotland later this month, there will be several occasions for which I need to look like a decent American and even one occasion for which I must meet the dress code for the oldest social club in Edinburgh. Yikes.

Casual shirts in size medium usually fit me pretty well. Dress shirts are a different story. The size with agreeable shoulders and sleeve length are grossly full in the chest and waist. The fabric billows into a bagel above my waist.

I’m an old hand now at understanding how to get tweed jackets to fit. Shirts, not so much. The wonderful Chinese tailor lady in Winston-Salem who worked on my tweed jackets has retired. Shirts, I figured, could be handled by someone here in the country. Some time back I had noticed a sign in a yard on the way to Madison advertising sewing and alterations. I took two Ralph Lauren dress shirts there.

I had no idea what was involved. I had assumed that it meant pinning the shirt to fit, then removing some seams, cutting out some fabric, and making new flat felled seams. When I picked up the shirts, they fit just fine. But she had done the job with what amounted to a single long seam, with appropriate curves, from the cuff through the armpit and down to the shirttail. The original flat felled seams in the sides and down the sleeves were now gone.

OK. Fine. It’s just a shirt and doesn’t have to be perfect, unlike tweed jackets, which last a lifetime. Plus these shirts will be worn under jackets and sweaters.

I realized: Heck fire. I can sew well enough to do that. So I bought a third Ralph Lauren dress shirt in the same size and did the job myself.

What little skill I have at the sewing machine I learned from my mother, when I was probably 11 or 12 years old. That’s a strange thing for a boy to learn from his mother, but partly it was because the machine itself fascinated me, and I love machines. From how-to videos on YouTube, though, I can see that there are many men who alter their own clothing. Two or three times in my life I’ve tried to actually make something, but I’m just not good enough at it. But anybody can sew a simple seam. It was bean bags, as I recall, that my mother started us on, because my younger sister was learning to sew around the same time.

I was amused by the photos on the Ralph Lauren web site. All those shirts have been adjusted to fit the models. The standard sizes just don’t fit lean people. I could have taken in my shirts a little more, but I don’t think that overly tight shirts would be very becoming on someone my age. I’m satisfied just with getting rid of the billows and bagels.

By the way, there is far greater variety of men’s dress shirts on eBay than you’ll find online. Most of the shirts on the Ralph Lauren web site were in cool pastels that I don’t think would look good with winter clothing. I didn’t much like the prices, either.

⬆︎ My rarely used sewing machine was happy to get some daylight and exercise.

⬆︎ This photo is from the Ralph Lauren web site. New shirts similar to my $13 eBay shirt are $148.