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Thursday, January 31, 2008: I'm excited to announce a new collaboration with (the) Manolo (for the) Men 'blog. I'll keep writing longer pieces for this site, with shorter, snippier bits there. ManoloMen's Izzy will continue his magnificent-ness there, and I will add some sparkle of my own. Thanks to The Manolo!
Thursday, November 29, 2007
to improve a shirt collar
 Arthur Wolf, with his invention.
Do you ever wonder where the little doo-dads and widgets in our clothing come from? Most have documented history of coming from military clothing (like the epaulet, or the flat-front trouser), or from workwear (like denim), or from being some sort of adapted holdover from a more elegant time (like the necktie). But look at your clothing and notice all the things that must exist for a reason, but we don't quite know why. Why is a shirt cuff made the way it is? Why do we have belt loops the way we do? For that matter, where did belts come from? I recently found myself interested in collar stays, those flexible little pieces of plastic that decorate the floor of my closet and belong in my shirt collars, keeping them straight.
Brooks Brothers is very proud of its story about being the first to introduce the button-down collar in the United States circa 1900 after seeing it worn by polo players in England. But as far as I know, no one has marketed the romantic story of the boring, functional, nearly-unchanged-in-85-years, collar stay--the story of the 12-year-old Viennese boy that invented it, patented it, and put it into production in his family's furnishings business simply because he didn't like the prevailing button-down collar. "I felt it was for babies!" he said. Like mittens that you clip onto your sleeves, I presumed. Maybe too fussy, or too precautionary.
I have known Arthur Wolf for a few years (he's the grandfather of a good friend) and heard anecdotally that when he was in the garment business he invented the collar stay. I guess I just believed it and moved on. But, wanting to know the whole story, I sat down with him last week in his home in Mamaroneck, New York.
And so the story goes: Arthur was 12 years old in 1922, living in Vienna and working for his family's men's furnishings business, called IWONA. They made sport shirts, dress shirts, and shorts. (Of the under-short variety.) I had to confirm this date with him more than once, because he explains it all so naturally, the way you might confirm that you did indeed buy milk at the store today. "Oh sure!" And he's quite clear: it was before his bar mitzvah that he got this patent. "They knew me at the patent office. I would come and bother them because you always had to research what was already patented."
His idea of the collar stay was exactly the same then as it is now, and in form (though not material) it is identical. He wanted a softer collar, like the button-down, but with the form and appearance of a stiffer collar. Plastic the way we know it today did not exist, so the prototypes were made from celluloid, a firm yet flexible material that had only one undesirable trait for putting into shirt collars: it is highly flammable. "One press of the iron -- poof!" he tells me. So they used metal, too, usually covered in fabric like in the photo above, until a suitable plastic was invented in 1925 or '26.
Getting it into the shirt was easy for him because he was so familiar with all the steps of production, being around it all the time. He figured out a way to cut back the bottom layer of the collar just enough to make an entry point, then sew a little pocket into it for the stay to slide in. A few other versions of the stay existed, too, but only the classic one survives today. (See the photo below for a multi-branch stay that worked the same way, but gave more structure to the collar point.)
Arthur's story continued in the shirt business for a few decades, moving to the United States, and within six months of arriving in New York getting another patent on collar and cuff production methods. He is unstoppable.
For me, I cannot insert two collar stays into my shirt anymore without thinking of Arthur. Such a clever idea, perfect from the beginning, unchanged to this day.
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