FIT | 1

SHIRTS: AN OVERVIEW

WHAT’S A SHIRT?

Shirts (or “button-ups” as some readers may prefer) are upper-body garments that include the following construction characteristics:

1. A shirt is almost always cut from single layers of woven-fabric (sorry, knit shirts not covered here), except for common neck- and wrist-finishing details such as collars and cuffs, and closure-reinforcing bands, all of which may be cut from double fabric layers (or they are faced or folded back).

2. A shirt rarely has any sort of built-in body- or silhouette-shaping devices or layers, such as shoulder, chest, or bust pads; boning; or other stiffening. Areas such as cuffs and collars are commonly interfaced for the sake of preserving, smoothing, and emphasizing their own specific shape, not the body wearing the garment.

3. Quite commonly, but not necessarily, shirts are joined at the shoulders with another double-layered area called a yoke; double layers of a yoke help strengthen the shoulder area and provide an easy and non- chafing way to offset and finish the shoulder seams in a single-layer garment.

4. Usually a shirt is hemmed in such a nonobtrusive way that it can be either worn tucked into a waistband or left untucked.

5. Typically, shirts are made from basic pattern shapes that don’t obviously mimic or attempt to follow body curves and contours and are, more often than not, intended to be worn loose rather than tight. This last characteristic is, of course, exactly what we’ll be exploring in this book, and so the drape-to-fit process requires that, to some degree, we understand all the other elements that make a shirt a shirt, assuming we want our project to still be a shirt when we’re finished.

BASIC SHIRT SHAPES: THE RECTANGULAR BODY

The vast majority of manufactured shirts have bodies just like those below, bodies that are basically rectangular, with fronts, which when closed are the same width as the backs. Additionally, these shirts are typically constructed with straight, on-grain side seams from the armholes to the hems, and the shoulder width at the top of the armholes is equal in width to the body or just a little smaller.

Shirt body shapes like this are clearly a sensible and practical choice for manufacturers because they keep patternmaking issues and sizing choices as simple as possible. They ensure that, no matter where the customer’s upper body is widest—at the shoulders, chest, waist, or hips—as long as that width is less than the shirt body’s uniform width anywhere, the shirt will be wearable…and most customers will think that it “fits” or at least fits as well as can be expected.

This same rectangular strategy has been used for literally thousands of years by makers and wearers of basic upper-body garments the world over and it helped create the ancestors of the modern shirt. This persistence is not about style or tradition as much as simple effectiveness. For much of our history as woven-fabric clothes-wearers, it was even more relentlessly applied, with the rectangle ruling every part and detail of many basic upper garments, as worn by people at every level of society. This approach also reduced any need for personalized garment shaping to the barest minimum, clearly a virtue when all woven-fabric garments were necessarily both hand-woven and hand-sewn, one at a time.

But it’s not the history that interests me. Again, it’s the sheer effectiveness of the rectangle as an upper-body garment shape, even when, as in those earlier epochs, the shoulders, sleeves, and armholes are also completely rectangular and curve free.

Look, below, how these completely rectangular-shouldered, traditional yet still contemporary garments manage to mold to the wearers shoulders quite well, despite their shape. This is due to the natural flexibility and weight—in other words, the drape—of the woven fabric. This may seem a minor detail compared to the obvious nonfitting excesses of fabric elsewhere in garments, but as we’ll see next, this wide-shoulder solution is still very much in place on a huge proportion of existing, every-day, nontraditional shirts.

THE LOOSE SHIRT: NOT FITTED, BUT STILL FITS

We can be quite sure that none of the shirts pictured below are made entirely from rectangular pieces because they feature shoulders that are—to some degree—angled downward, with curved armholes and shaped sleeve caps. Like the modern shirts shown flat on the previous pages, note how they all have (as purely rectangular garments do) shoulder widths that are greater than their wearer’s actual shoulders. And notice, in each case pictured here, how smoothly both the shirt shoulders (from the ends of the shoulders inward) and the fronts lay against the wearer’s bodies, with all the excess shirt width falling to the sides and against the sleeves, which, in every case, are as loose fitting as the bodies from which they fall.

It’s equally unlikely that any of these shirts have shoulder slopes that were custom fit to the bodies inside. In fact, what I gather from these examples, and the endless others I’ve seen walking around, is that when the garment shoulder on a loose and basically rectangular garment is wider than the body, it doesn’t matter what the shoulder angle is, because the natural drape of the garment will simply adapt to the body shape, from shoulder to shoulder, so that the shirt falls smoothly over the body, because it’s wide enough to do so. What happens under the arms and below the upper chest depends on the body shape beneath the garment, but if the overall width is sufficient to cover whatever is there without discomfort, the job is done for the loose shirt, no further fitting required.

The easy, practical magic and popularity of the basic, generic rectangular garment persists in shirts like these, and not just for powerless victims of manufacturing economies, but by choice as a desirable, natural looking, everyday style because of the completely nonbinding freedom of movement these garments still deliver.

Of course, as garment makers as well as wearers, we sewers are nonetheless very likely to want to improve the fit of any garments or patterns that fit like some these examples, which is what the rest of this book is about. I believe it’s important to recognize that for many wearers, these loose examples are not examples of poor fit but are, in fact, good examples of exactly what makes some shirts, favorite shirts.

HERE’S ANOTHER WAY TO COMPARE THE PURELY RECTANGULAR SHIRT AND THE MODERN LOOSE SHIRT

The illustration, below left, shows the pure rectangle with a neck opening and armholes drawn in red; the illustration on the right shows the modern loose shirt. The modern loose shirt is shown with a rounded neck and curved and slightly dropped armholes. This significantly advances the cause of matching shirt shape to body shape, but these openings are no more personalized than those on the rectangular shirt. Nor are the shirt bodies really any different. Both have fronts and backs identical in width and alignment, and both place the shoulder, and thus the back neckline and the sleeve center lines, right at the top edge where the fronts and backs meet.

So, the placement of the openings is improved in the modern version, but the strategy for fitting the body of the wearer with either the rectangular or modern shirt body remains the same, which is about as sophisticated and personalized as a sandwich board, and will settle on any specific body (if an open collar allows), with little regard for the actual body shape within.

Remarkably enough, this often works out fairly well with shirts (they’re woven fabric, which helps!), even though very few humans are the same width—or length—in the front and back, with shoulders perfectly symmetrical, and necks protruding at just the slightly forward-tilting angle that these necklines predict.

HOW DO SHIRTS FIT?

If a “well-fitting garment” is defined as one that covers the body smoothly, with few if any wrinkles when worn, woven-fabric shirts simply don’t now, and never have, actually fit the definition. They’ve always been the garment equivalent of sheets on a bed with someone sleeping in it.

Nor have most shirts ever really been expected to fit any better than this, even now when the trend is for very tight fit. Compare the two upper rows of images, below, of typical, classic shirt silhouettes, with the generally more current, modern examples in the two lower rows, and you’ll see that shirt wrinkling gets more complex as shirt shapes get both less rectangular and smaller. Tighter clothes must deal with ever more complex body shapes and must be more uniquely fitted to benefit all the various types (and shapes) of unique bodies.

Because woven shirts are generally lightweight-fabric garments with no built-in shape support except the body it is covering, it’s inevitable that shirts will wrinkle as a reaction to almost any movement of that body, so the most telling images on the previous pages are those in which the wearer is more or less standing still and upright, with arms down at the sides. If the shirt is straining, slumping, or otherwise wrinkling around even such a default position, we can’t excuse these wrinkles as temporarily motion induced. Instead, we’ll use these specific types of wrinkles as our guides to creating a better fit, and let the motion-induced wrinkles live on. However, we will remain alert to any options for reducing or adjusting motion-induced wrinkles if we feel compelled to do so, by wearing comfort, or for any other reason.

Put another way, I’ll be confining my fitting goal in this book to this: To remove or reduce wrinkles on the torso form or on a standing-straight-and-still body as much as possible, as shown in examples below, while keeping the fabric grain as level and vertical as possible, all while adjusting the amount of ease through three different, roughly defined levels of fit: loosely fitted, fitted, and tightly fitted. I’ll leave any further pattern refinements up to each reader/maker/wearer, with particular regards toward comfort and planned activity levels.

Still, it’s worth noting that there’s quite a wide range of completely subjective things we might also mean when we think or feel that a shirt, or any garment, “fits” beyond not wrinkling when standing still.

• We could mean it’s flattering, making the wearer look good, perhaps by revealing the figure inside to advantage, or by concealing it, or by doing a bit of both.

• Or we might mean that some certain style or fashionable silhouette has been well balanced with the shape of a unique body. This may require that the garment not match the body inside in some places or ways. Keep in mind though, that very few shirts will have been custom-fitted to the wearer, so very few styles of wearing them will be based on this option.

• Maybe we mean the garment feels good to wear: it’s comfortable, regardless of how it may look, which is directly related to, and can vary considerably depending on, what activities we’re engaging in while wearing it.

• Or we might mean that we feel good wearing it, which could be quite different for those who like a loose, nonbinding fit above all else and those who like tight and may even prefer some binding somewhere to feeling swamped or hidden in anything too loose.

For these, or any other subjective reasons, any of the shirt-wearers at left could reasonably feel that their shirt “fits” just as they prefer. But for our purposes, suffice it to say that a wrinkle-free start will probably be a useful one, and good to know how to achieve in any case.

Finally, it’s important to realize that the more we reshape a generic, simple shirt to match our unique shape in one set position, the less easily it may sit on us as we take other positions, so we’ll always have to test for good-fitting against overfitting.