I have been reading a bunch of books and they all take place around the early 1900s. They all have characters which at some point…Go to put on a clean shirt and a clean collar.
Example: “Henry wanting to impress his future son-in-law took off his work suit and put on a clean shirt and clean collar with a freshly pressed vest.”
Isn’t a collar part of a shirt? If it wasn’t back then what exactly was it?
In victorian times, the collars were removable so that they could be starched and washed separately; you changed your collar every day, but you might have worn the same shirt for up to a week.
Used to be that a collar was a stiff band that was not part of the shirt. You buttoned it on. I don’t know why. Maybe they changed collars more often than they changed shirts, or a very stiff starched collar was in vogue though you didn’t have to starch the whole shirt. Dunno.
(part of the reason being that people wore so many layers of clothing that the collar of the shirt was really the only bit visible.
Shirts and collars were separate items way back when. Easier to launder since the shirt was a separate item. Clothes were boiled to make them white, collars wouldn’t have survived this process. Collars were made from very stiff materials, usually celluloid. The collar was attached by buttons to a small band of material at the neckline, similar to the band collar or “collarless” shirts you may have seen.Then various types of neckties were put in place. Gentlemen may have had many shirts, but only 2 or 3 collars, since they fit them all, it saved a little money.
If you have seen something described as a grandfather shirt then that is what a shirt used to be. The collar came separate and made it “dressed up”.
I have worn a shirt and collar (no, I’m not that old–I was in the Phila. Shakespeare Co.'s Measure for Measure, which took place in the 1920s).
Those damn things were very hard to manage, though I guess if you were used to it, it got easier. The collar had three holes in it, which matched up to holes on the shirt. You’d put the shirt on, put the studs into the shirt or the collar (whichever was easiest for you to manage) and work the stud into the other hole, as the two others invariably popped out and fell on the floor.
One must also remember the great potential for emotional expression (particularly surprise or exasperation) afforded by an inopportune loss of collar pressure. That is, in the event of catastrophic stud failure as described by Eve above, the collar remains attached only at the back of the neck, whilst the ends fly off in a most comical manner.
Seems like Buster Keaton did this frequently… although it seems to have been a mainstay of visual comedy (early films, comic strips like Little Nemo and Bringing Up Father, and so forth). Kind of a combination of the spit-take and that comic wah-WAH fog-horn noise, for loss of a better description.
But my favorite bit of collararia concerns the aftermath of the Great Earthquake and Fire of '06 (in San Francisco, just to clarify). Due to the incredible confusion, the haste with which families left their homes, and the poor reliability of the internet message boards of the day, many families were forced to leave notes for their misplaced loved ones on bulletin boards in public parks and so forth. Because paper was in short supply, celluloid and cloth collars were used as writing material; in one instance, a celluloid collar was sent back East via the post, and despite a lack of postage, was delivered, along with its message of “I’m not dead” (well, words to that effect, anyway). Sorry, I can’t recall where I read that one.
Scroll down to the bottom of this page to see a variety of 19th-century collar styles.
Interesting…When did the seperate collar and shirt go out of style. These stories go thru about 1920. Just till a couple years after WWI
The 1920s and '30s did indeed usher in the death of the separate collar. President Coolidge, c1930, was already seen as old-fashioned for his adhering to the older style.
I recall reading somewhere that John Tower wore shirts with separate collars. I couldn’t find anything on Google, though.