Detachable Collars

[Evan Everhart]

Nice collars old man! Bravo! Are you into stand up collars at all? If so, you might be interested in a poke collar

 

[Mr. Garrulus]

Might show my collars as well, they all fit me and are sizes 39 or 40cm expect the top right corner one which is 42cm, wanted it because of it's style. Hopefully I will find another one in my size. I'm a fan of high collars as you may see.

 

[Luxire]

Shirts with detachable collars: Even without attaching a collar, the shirt can be worn as a Mandarin Collar shirt.














Detachable Vintage Collar. Made stiff and true to period.

 

[Dinerman]

JonnyO, The Arrow "Gage" model collar was introduced in 1923, described as a "small roll front" collar. They kept the model name into the 1950s for attached collar shirts, by that point, described as a "soft collar with 'regular' length points".

 

[BR Gordon]

These are my collars and collar boxes:




After using these collars a few times, I understand why gentlemen, who may change two, three, or even four time a day, had valets.

I've seen collar boxes that have slots in the top, for collar studs, but I have no idea what the leather loops, on the lid of the left hand box are for.

 

[Nick D]

Just keep using them, it gets a lot easier, until you can button the collar and tie the tie at least as fast as with a collar attached shirt.

 

[cpdv]

I have a little over a weeks worth of slidewell and arrow collars all teens vintage. If you are tricky you can convert modern dress shirts with some stitch ripping and stitching back together.

 

[JonnyO]

JonnyO, The Arrow "Gage" model collar was introduced in 1923, described as a "small roll front" collar. They kept the model name into the 1950s for attached collar shirts, by that point, described as a "soft collar with 'regular' length points".

Thank you very much for the run down Dinerman, greatly appreciated.

 

[vitanola]

High hats and Arrow collars,
White spats and lots of dollars,
Spending every dime,
For a wonderful time...

If you're blue and you dunno,
Where to go to,
Why don'tcha go,
Where fashion sits?
Puttin' on the Ritz... .

How about the correct, original lyrics, which had a very different tone indeed:

Have you seen the "well-to-do" up on Lenox Avenue (Lenox avenue was the Rialto of Harlem in the late 1920's)
On that famous thoroughfare with their noses in the air
High Hats and colored collars, white spats and fifteen dollars (Fifteen dollars was a common weekly wage of "The Help")
Spending every dime for a wonderful time!

If you're blue and you don't know where to go to, why don't you go where Harlem sits?
Puttin' on the Ritz
Spangled gowns upon a bevy of "High Browns" from down the levee, all MISFITS
Puttin' on the Ritz
That's where each and every "Lulubelle" goes,
every Thursday evening with her "swell" beaux (rubbing elbows) (Thursday was the traditional maid's night off)
Come with me and we'll attend their Jubilee and see them spend their last two bits
Puttin on the Ritz.

The original lyrics make much more sense, and are not nearly as contrived. By the late 1940's, however, the idea of going slumming in Harlem to watcg the poor Negroes frolic was no longer socially acceptable, hence the rewritten lyric.

[video=youtube_share;zb8z6U9UpKE]http://youtu.be/zb8z6U9UpKE[/video]

 

[Stanley Doble]

Harlem was fashionable in the twenties. White patrons flocked to the famous Cotton Club for the jazz shows. This is what Putting On The Ritz in its original form was about.

Later when fashions changed Cole Porter rewrote the lyrics and got some more mileage (royalties) out of it. This kind of thing was not uncommon at the time. Some songs were re released with no changes except a new title on the sheet music.

Langston Hughes explains.

When the Negro Was in Vogue

from The Big Sea* by Langston Hughes

White people began to come to Harlem in droves. For several years they packed the expensive Cotton Club on Lenox Avenue. But I was never there, because the Cotton Club was a Jim Crow club for gangsters and monied whites. They were not cordial to Negro patronage, unless you were a celebrity like Bojangles. So Harlem Negroes did not like the Cotton Club and never appreciated its Jim Crow policy in the very heart of their dark community. Nor did ordinary Negroes like the growing influx of whites toward Harlem after sundown, flooding the little cabarets and bars where formerly only colored people laughed and sang, and where now the strangers were given the best ringside tables to sit and stare at the Negro customers--like amusing animals in a zoo.

The Negroes said: "We can't go downtown and sit and stare at you in your clubs. You won't even let us in your clubs." But they didn't say it out loud--for Negroes are practically never rude to white people. So thousands of whites came to Harlem night after night, thinking the Negroes loved to have them there, and firmly believing that all Harlemites left their houses at sundown to sing and dance in cabarets, because most of the whites saw nothing but the cabarets, not the houses.

Some of the owners of Harlem clubs, delighted at the flood of white patronage, made the grievous error of barring their own race, after the manner of the famous Cotton Club. But most of these quickly lost business and folded up, because they failed to realize that a large part of the Harlem attraction for downtown New Yorkers lay in simply watching the colored customers amuse themselves. And the smaller clubs, of course, had no big floor shows or a name band like the Cotton Club, where Duke Ellington usually held forth, so, without black patronage, they were not amusing at all.

Some of the small clubs, however, had people like Gladys Bentley, who was something worth discovering in those days, before she got famous, acquired an accompanist, specially written material, and conscious vulgarity. But for two or three amazing years, Miss Bentley sat, and played a big piano all night long, literally all night, without stopping--singing songs like "St. James Infirmary," from ten in the evening until dawn, with scarcely a break between the notes, sliding from one song to another, with a powerful and continuous under beat of jungle rhythm. Miss Bentley was an amazing exhibition of musical energy--a large, dark, masculine lady, whose feet pounded the floor while her fingers pounded the keyboard--a perfect piece of African sculpture, animated by her own rhythm…

But when the place where she played became too well known, she began to sing with an accompanist, became a star, moved to a larger place, then downtown, and is now in Hollywood. The old magic of the woman and the piano and the night and the rhythm being one is gone. But everything goes, one way or the other. The '20s are gone and lots of fine things in Harlem night life have disappeared like snow in the sun--since it became utterly commercial, planned for the downtown tourist trade, and therefore dull.

 

[vitanola]

Harlem was fashionable in the twenties. White patrons flocked to the famous Cotton Club for the jazz shows. This is what Putting On The Ritz in its original form was about.

Later when fashions changed Cole Porter rewrote the lyrics and got some more mileage (royalties) out of it. This kind of thing was not uncommon at the time. Some songs were re released with no changes except a new title on the sheet music.

Langston Hughes explains.

When the Negro Was in Vogue

from The Big Sea* by Langston Hughes

White people began to come to Harlem in droves. For several years they packed the expensive Cotton Club on Lenox Avenue. But I was never there, because the Cotton Club was a Jim Crow club for gangsters and monied whites. They were not cordial to Negro patronage, unless you were a celebrity like Bojangles. So Harlem Negroes did not like the Cotton Club and never appreciated its Jim Crow policy in the very heart of their dark community. Nor did ordinary Negroes like the growing influx of whites toward Harlem after sundown, flooding the little cabarets and bars where formerly only colored people laughed and sang, and where now the strangers were given the best ringside tables to sit and stare at the Negro customers--like amusing animals in a zoo.

The Negroes said: "We can't go downtown and sit and stare at you in your clubs. You won't even let us in your clubs." But they didn't say it out loud--for Negroes are practically never rude to white people. So thousands of whites came to Harlem night after night, thinking the Negroes loved to have them there, and firmly believing that all Harlemites left their houses at sundown to sing and dance in cabarets, because most of the whites saw nothing but the cabarets, not the houses.

Some of the owners of Harlem clubs, delighted at the flood of white patronage, made the grievous error of barring their own race, after the manner of the famous Cotton Club. But most of these quickly lost business and folded up, because they failed to realize that a large part of the Harlem attraction for downtown New Yorkers lay in simply watching the colored customers amuse themselves. And the smaller clubs, of course, had no big floor shows or a name band like the Cotton Club, where Duke Ellington usually held forth, so, without black patronage, they were not amusing at all.

Some of the small clubs, however, had people like Gladys Bentley, who was something worth discovering in those days, before she got famous, acquired an accompanist, specially written material, and conscious vulgarity. But for two or three amazing years, Miss Bentley sat, and played a big piano all night long, literally all night, without stopping--singing songs like "St. James Infirmary," from ten in the evening until dawn, with scarcely a break between the notes, sliding from one song to another, with a powerful and continuous under beat of jungle rhythm. Miss Bentley was an amazing exhibition of musical energy--a large, dark, masculine lady, whose feet pounded the floor while her fingers pounded the keyboard--a perfect piece of African sculpture, animated by her own rhythm…

But when the place where she played became too well known, she began to sing with an accompanist, became a star, moved to a larger place, then downtown, and is now in Hollywood. The old magic of the woman and the piano and the night and the rhythm being one is gone. But everything goes, one way or the other. The '20s are gone and lots of fine things in Harlem night life have disappeared like snow in the sun--since it became utterly commercial, planned for the downtown tourist trade, and therefore dull.

No, Cole Porter had naught to do with it. Irving Berlin was the composer and lyricist.

The original lyric was referring to the practice commonly known as "slumming", traveling to Harlem NOT to see the shows produced for white audiences at the Cotton Club or at Connie's Inn, but to go and sit up in the gallery at dance halls such as the Savoy, or the little hole-in-the-wall jazz clubs, to watch the working class negroes disport themselves.

 

[Anthony Jordan]

Slightly concerned that I may be running short of collars....

 

[Anthony Jordan]

I see, by the way, that Darcy Clothing have brought out a new line in detachable collared/neckband shirts with matching soft collars in four stripes: http://www.darcyclothing.com/shop/shirts/neckband-shirtwith-separate-collar-sh185.html

It may be my prejudice but why they chose to have themmade with button cuffs....

 

[Anthony Jordan]

Which to wear first?

 

[esteban68]

they should keep you going for a while!

 

[Anthony Jordan]

Some nice spearpoints in there too!

 

[Boinciel]

I just got some detachable soft collar shirts from Luxire (2 club, 2 spearpoint, 1 medium spread - very nice work on all, I must say), and wore the collars outside the shirt band a few times before realising that wearing them inside the band is a more comfortable and economical option - I can wear the shirts multiple times and just wash the collars out, and if they get the nasty ring around the neck the collars will be much easier to scrub. I understand that for hard, starched collars wearing them outside the collar band is the norm, but wearing these inside makes me wonder if wearing the collar on the inside is the way they should be worn instead.

 

[Nick D]

I understand that for hard, starched collars wearing them outside the collar band is the norm, but wearing these inside makes me wonder if wearing the collar on the inside is the way they should be worn instead.

No, every advertisement and photo and film that you can see how they're worn, the collar is invariably on the outside of the shirt's collar band. How are you even attaching the back? The hole for the button is on the outside, unless it goes all the way through. That being said, I have seen some modern interpretations that have the collar's stand on the inside.

 

[Shangas]

Every historical reenactment or historical TV show I've ever seen has the collars OUTSIDE the shirt.

One particularly good example can be seen in one of the last episodes of "Upstairs, Downstairs".

Hudson is helping his master, Lord Bellamy, get dressed for his last session in parliament, and Lord Bellamy puts on a collar and tie. The collar is clearly OUTSIDE the shirt. The tie is wrapped around, and then the starched collar is folded down over the top.

 

[Anthony Jordan]

Oddly enough, one tailor did make my collars so that they had to be worn inside the shirt, but that was a mistake on their part!