Custom Dress Shirts

Two or three is a sensible first order: it tells you how the collar and cuff feel over a full week before you commit to a dozen. Once the pattern is on file, adding to it is a phone call rather than another appointment.

It depends on your face and how you wear a tie. A spread suits a narrower face and carries a wider knot; a point lengthens a rounder face; a cutaway is the dressiest; a button-down is the most casual. Sam will hold each against you rather than have you guess from a diagram.

Barrel for daily wear, French for links and black tie. If you are ordering more than one shirt, it is worth having both, because the same fabric in a different cuff genuinely changes what the shirt is for.

Poplin presses crispest and is the business default. Twill is softer, drapes better and resists creasing on a long day. Oxford is heavier and reads casual, which is right for a weekend shirt. All two-ply cottons, which is what keeps a shirt going past a season.

Fabric is accounted for before it is cut, so a shirt that fits on delivery still fits after washing. Wash cool and hang it damp rather than tumbling it hot and the collar and cuffs will outlast the body of the shirt.

That is exactly where a made shirt earns its place. A big chest with a smaller waist, long arms, a heavy neck: off-the-rack forces you to buy for the largest measurement and swim in the rest. Yours is cut to each measurement separately.

Two to three weeks, the first shirt and the twentieth alike. What the kept pattern changes is not the making time but everything before it: no measuring, no guessing, no starting again.

Yes, on the cuff or the breast, in thread you choose. Two or three letters is the usual. It is the detail nobody else notices and you do, which is rather the point of having a shirt made.

I make custom dress shirts to measure at the Vaughan studio and travel to Toronto clients by appointment. Your collar, cuff and body are cut to you, and your pattern is kept so reorders take a phone call.

If a store collar gapes, the body billows or the cuff swallows your watch, then yes. A shirt cut to your neck, shoulders and arm length is an upgrade you notice every morning, and it's reorderable once the pattern exists.

Most men start with two or three in white and blue to prove the pattern, then reorder in stripes and weekend fabrics. There's no minimum with me. Begin with one if you like.

Spread or point for a tie, button-down for softer days, cutaway if you like a wide knot; barrel cuff for everyday, French for links. I'll steer you by your neck, your face and how you actually dress.