A white collared shirt is canonically hard to find. I’ve been looking since getting rid of a Brooks Brothers boys’ dress shirt last October (nice fabric; never fit quite right) with little success — as a five-foot-tall person who wears mostly men’s clothing, I could never find something my size that wasn’t hourglass-shaped and/or diaphanous. I wanted boxy, sturdy, not too fussy with a collar that felt remotely proportional to my body and face. My search led me to Dickies work shirts, which I nearly eliminated — the smallest men’s size was too big, and the women’s shirt has that nipped waist that I can’t stand. Then I found the brand’s $35 cropped version, which combines the boxiness of the men’s model but the narrower shoulders and smaller collar of the women’s pattern. On a whim, I bought it.
When the shirt came, I liked it, but something about the double patch pockets on the chest irked me — it felt like too much going on. It took me about 30 minutes to pick them off with my seam ripper; the crop was a bit high for me, so it took another ten to unpick the shirt’s hem and steam it flat, which added about an extra inch of length. (A tip for using a seam ripper: It can be tricky to distinguish between thread and the garment’s fibers, which are usually the same color. Make sure you’re grabbing only thread with the tool’s point — if you rip textile fibers, it can leave a hole.) I have a few seam rippers, but the one I reach for most often is made by the sewing brand Clover. There’s a small ring of ergonomic rubber around where my thumb rests, so it doesn’t slip around in my hand while I’m digging out stitches.
Minus the patch pockets and hem, the shirt is perfect. It looks minimalist and structured, cropped but not too cropped, sitting just around the top of the hip bone. I wear it with everything, from nylon gym shorts to swooping silk suit pants, and it never looks out of place. It’s the rare collared shirt that never makes you seem overdressed, but even with the raw hem, it doesn’t skew zhlubby.
I credit that to the shirt’s construction from a medium-weight cotton-polyester blend, the same fabric as the men’s version. I am normally a skeptic of fabrics with that composition — I prefer the feel and durability of natural fibers, and poly-cotton blends can be prone to sagging or pilling as they wear in. But I’ve never had that problem with Dickies fabric, no matter what I put it through. (And I recently wore my Dickies skateboarder pants to move apartments, so they’ve been scraped, stretched, used to brace the corners of heavy wooden furniture, etc.) It also takes edits well (as skateboarders know): The twill weave is dense enough that it frays without unraveling, so you can leave your cut sleeves and undone hems raw and they’ll be fine with the occasional trim for loose threads. The shirt is hard-wearing and stain-resistant enough that I don’t have to treat it as preciously as my other white button-downs, which means I get more wear out of it.
The shirt
The seam ripper
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