Men's Cotton Shirt

Details

An everyday full-sleeve shirt in 100 percent cotton poplin, mill-woven on a powerloom in Coimbatore at 40s count and a measured 120 GSM. It is a powerloom shirt and this listing says so on purpose. There is a handloom shirt on this shelf at 1590 and it is a different proposition: there the slub and the irregularity are what you are buying. A shirt worn five days a week wants the opposite, and the powerloom is the right loom for that job rather than a compromise on the way to a better one. It holds pick density constant across the whole roll, so the two front panels match, the pocket sits square and the stripe does not wander, and a mill can put four collar sizes on a shelf at once, which a weaver making a few metres a day cannot. The cheats in a mill shirt are elsewhere. The first is fibre: 60/40 poly-cotton costs a third less, presses flatter and is sold as cotton because nobody can tell it by hand. The second is the collar, and this is the honest one: almost every shirt under 2000 rupees has a fused collar, which is fine, and almost none of them say which fusible went in, which is not. A cheap low-melt non-woven fusing delaminates after a dozen washes and the collar bubbles, and that single defect retires more shirts than worn-out cloth ever does. The third is the stitching, where 8 stitches to the inch and an overlocked side seam is the fast way through a factory, and the seam puckers and then gapes.

• 100 percent cotton, confirmed by FTIR, no polyester and no wrinkle-free resin
• 120 GSM poplin in 40s cotton, measured on the finished cloth
• The collar and cuffs are fused, and we name the fusible: a woven cotton interlining rather than a polyester non-woven, bonded at controlled temperature and tested for delamination after 20 washes
• 16 stitches per inch on side seams and armholes, 18 on collar and cuff edges
• Single-needle side seams and armholes, sewn in two passes, not overlocked
• Corozo nut buttons, cross-stitched, with two spares inside the placket
• Pre-shrunk, under 2 percent residual shrinkage, ISO 6330
• Reactive-dyed and azo-free, colourfastness to washing grade 4 to 5 on the ISO 105 grey scale
• This is single-ply 40s, not two-ply. It will begin to pill at the collar and cuff a year before the two-ply handloom shirt does, and it costs 400 less
• A fused collar cannot be turned by a tailor when the edge wears, which the unfused handloom collar can. If you want a shirt to keep for a decade, that is the one to buy
• It creases. Cotton with no resin in it creases, and the resin that stops it is formaldehyde-based