How the Perfect Dress Shirt Should Fit
There’s more to ordering a custom shirt than just putting in the order. You have to know how the perfect dress shirt should fit your frame. You have to look at the sleeves, the collar, the location of the seams, the fit against your torso and the length of the shirt tails. In general, the shirt should emphasize the positive qualities of your physique while de-emphasizing the negative qualities.
The fit of a shirt should be judged by the way in which you expect to wear the shirt. If you plan to wear the shirt under layers, then the torso fit will be less important and the collar fit more important. Torso fit, on the other hand, becomes very important if you plan to wear the shirt with no covering layers.
Shirt sleeves should not fit tightly around your arm; sleeves also should not balloon and billow. The cuff of a sleeve should reach the point where your wrist meets your palm. The cuff should not be so tight that it cannot slide down over the palm; however, the sleeve should not actually slide down over your palm. When bending your arm, the cuff should not slide up your arm more than one inch or so. When wearing a jacket, the sleeve should extend a bit less than an inch past the end of the jacket’s sleeve.
Then there’s shirt collars. You should be able to fit one finger in between your neck and the buttoned collar of a well-fitted dress shirt. Match the shape of the collar to the shape of your face and neck. When a good tailor is taking the measurements for your custom shirt, he will notice whether your face is rounded or narrow and whether your neck is long or short. A round face needs a pointed collar while a narrow face is flattered by a spread collar. Tall collars are for long necks whereas short collars work well for short necks.
The seam across each shoulder should end at the farthest reach of each of your shoulder bones. The seams around the armholes should not make the shirt feel excessively tight around your underarms. Check the placement of the armholes to see if they are too low on the sides of the shirt by tucking in the shirt and lifting your arms up a bit above the horizontal. If more than an inch of tucked shirt is pulled up, then the armholes are too low.
The well-fitted shirt should allow freedom of movement around the torso and not be skin-tight. You should be able to pull a few inches of material out away from your chest and out away from your stomach. If there is more give than a few inches of give to the material, then the shirt is too big.
A dress shirt can be made with either tails or bottoms; bottoms can be either curved or flat. Tails are made for shirts intended to be tucked and are usually made with enough length not to cause any worry about the shirt being pulled out of the pants. However, the play of a bottom of a custom shirt that is meant to be untucked should be checked to see if lifting the arms would reveal skin or the bottom edge of the undershirt.