Dress shirt collar too big

If you are someone who likes a snug look than you may find yourself in a situation where your dress shirt collar it too big. There are few reasons this occurs. Maybe the fabric stretched, you bought the wrong size to begin with or your body changed. It may also be the case that there is a mismatch between the neck size and the other body measurements. This happens with off the rack shirts where the common sizing combinations don’t work for you. For example, if you are tall and slender, you may end up buying a larger collar size to get your desired sleeve length. While not the end of the world, a collar that is too big can break the overall snug look of the rest of your suit. If you are unsure about whether your shirt collar is the right size, you should be able to fit two fingers inside the collar when buttoned. Less than that is too tight, more than that leads to a gap between the collar and your neck. The main visual telltale is whether it’s gaping away from the neck. There are a few ways to address this problem ranging from quick hacks to permanent solutions.

Adding collar stays helps the collar maintain its form even if a little loose. This is something you can easily to at home and does not incur any additional cost. The main downside is that this doesn’t address the underlying issue of your size being wrong but rather blunts the visual impact. An alternative hack is to move the position of the button on the collar. This involves cutting the button off and then resewing slightly inward. This is cheap alteration that very quickly runs into problems because it leaves the collar unbalanced. The center of the button and button holes ought to be equidistant from their respective ends of the collar band. When you try and button the top button and the button has been moved the tie gap is affected and looks uneven. The tie is not centered between the two collar points and instead looks skewed. As you move the tie button inward, one side of the collar appears to submerge slightly under the other eliminating the tie gap and, depending on how much you move the button inward, creating a negative tie gap. This is not a crisp look and we do not recommend it as a way to fix your collar size.

There is a much better option that constitutes a more permanent solution. You can replace your collar with a smaller collar that perfectly fits your neck size. The collar maintains all its proportions and dimensions such as the tie gap, distance from the button to the edge of the collar band and the position of the collar points. Making a shirt collar smaller is a specialized shirt alteration that we perform routinely. Below we walk through an example of such a shirt.

Before: button was moved in an attempt to make collar smaller

In above image you see a white dress shirt with a 16.5-inch collar size that was too big for the owner of the shirt. The customer needed the collar size to be 15.75 inches. As a specialized shirtmaker we can support sizing gradations and increments that are non-standard including in this case three quarters of an inch. Apart from the collar being the wrong size to begin with, the collar appears to have been altered by moving the button hole inward using the method described above in a pyrrhic attempt to make the shirt collar smaller. As a result, you can see the two edges of the collar leaf crisscross each other. One point length falls under the other rather than being at the same height. The collar spread has been impacted by this, having been made wider. The collar points are not aligned at the same height. You can also see that the outside collar band (the one side with the button hole) extends over the edge of the shirt placket. This is the surest indication yet that the collar button has been moved from its original position. Overall, this is a visually off-balance collar stemming. The unevenness will be visible even when wearing a tie. Therefore, it’s clear that a new collar needs to be sewn on matching the desired measurements and specifications.

After: smaller collar sewn on with the correct proportions

Since the shirt is a thick dobby weave shirt, dobby shirting fabric was therefore selected to match the original shirt’s fabric. In general, every effort is made to match the weave of the original shirt whether dobby, plain, twill, herringbone, knitted or Oxford. The new collar was constructed in a smaller size that the original one in order. Instead of simply moving the button though this was done properly by moving both the button and the button hole inward equally leaving a larger gap from the edge of each end of the collar band respectively. The symmetry and relative proportions of the collar were carefully maintained. The collar leaf receded commensurately to preserve the tie space and to avoid one collar point submerging under the other. The spread also remains the same for the same reason. This ensures the collar looks even and balanced even though the size has changed.

A common misconception is that it’s not possible to put a smaller collar on a shirt as it would not work with the shirt’s neckline or that the alterations required to adjust the other shirt’s measurements would make it cost prohibitive. This could not be further from the truth when working with a skilled shirtmaker. Since all our collars are custom made we map the neck collar to the shirts existing neckline. This allows a smaller collar to map to an existing shirt neck hole. This is an important ingredient of our craftmanship since it avoids needing to recut the neckline which cannot be made smaller anyway, since that would require adding fabric, with most shirts lacking excess fabric at the seams. Our method allows us to make a collar smaller without needing to alter other shirt measurements, an important distinction. When all is said and done the shirt collar has been made smaller while the shirt is visually indistinguishable from what the original shirt looked like off the rack.