A GOOD COLLAR

The bright, clean top of a dress shirt is so important that it’s become slang for the jobs that require one: white-collar. And not so long ago, you could buy the collar on its own.
Fancy collars of some kind have been around since Queen Elizabeth I and her friends swanned around in pleated ruffs, but the dress shirt and its collar are another 19th century evolution.
Until then, men’s shirts had been pretty much the same since the Dark Ages: shapeless, blousy, and long. (Sometimes REALLY long – before modern underwear, men sometimes just tucked the shirt end in around everything. Yeah, you probably didn’t want to know that.)
By the 19th century, though, as the Romantic Era gave way to the Victorian, men’s clothes started to settle into a familiar configuration: tailored jacket, vest, and trousers, with a somewhat fitted shirt underneath (and yes, thank you, actual underpants!). Early in the century, shirts usually had attached collars, often starched up and worn with a cravat, the precursor to the tie, either inside or outside.
As industrialization went on, more and more men were working indoor jobs like clerks, bookkeepers, and managers, and they followed the same dress code as their “betters.” But all that washing, starching, and ironing was more than many of them could handle – or afford.
In the days before washing machines, laundry was a huge issue, whether in cost or time. Somebody had to get those shirts bright white and stiff – a woman in the home, or an outside laundry, and either way, it didn’t come cheap.
Fortunately, a blacksmith’s wife in Troy, New York had gotten sick of washing his shirts every day. Hannah Montague cut off hubby’s collars in 1827, cleaned them, and sewed them back in place. A local minister picked up the idea and ran with it, and detachable collars and cuffs soon became standard menswear.
Then it got even more interesting.
In another corner of the Industrial Revolution, celluloid was being invented as an early form of plastic. It was used as a substitute for ivory, in billiard balls, vanity sets, and any number of other things.
In the 1870s, some enterprising folks figured out a way to make celluloid into thin transparent sheets, and collar makers quickly realized it was a great way to keep their products stiff, clean, and waterproof – forever.
The new celluloid collars cost the same, or a bit more than the original linen or cotton ones, but since they didn’t have to be washed – and in fact couldn’t be – they were much cheaper in the long run. Cost per wear, the calculation some folks use even today when considering a clothing purchase, was far lower with celluloid.
Celluloid collars were an affordable way for the Bob Cratchits of the world to meet Scrooge’s workwear standards without his laundry budget. As women began inching their way into the office world, they, too, started wearing collared shirts, and they also bought celluloid ones. Everyone went white-collar…literally.
Celluloid collars went out in the 1930s when fashions changed.
One of celluloid’s other uses, though, lingered for a much longer time: in film stock. It was the standard in the film industry for decades. Early formulas, though, weren’t stable, and many historic movies no longer exist because they’ve simply disintegrated.
Some of the collars have survived in better shape, so some pieces of the early costumes have lasted longer than the films, which would have been far more important to history than those bits of early plastic. Irony alert!

Got a #ThrowbackThursday idea? Drop it in the comments!