Tops & Blouses

Shirting that hangs from the shoulder, knits cut to go under a jacket, and one thing each season that is not white.

Almost every top in this shop is bought against the same two tests, and both of them are about what goes over it. Does the shoulder take a jacket without doubling in thickness, and does the collar sit correctly when the jacket is closed. A top that fails either is a top that gets worn on its own for four weeks a year, which is a bad way to spend money.

The second thing we buy against is the drop from the shoulder. A shirt hung from the shoulder seam rather than the neck falls away from the body, which is what makes wide shirting wearable at thirty-eight degrees and what makes most of it unwearable if the cut is a size up rather than a shape.

The standing shapes

The wide shirt

From a Tokyo house of nine people. Three shapes, repeated for eleven years, with the cloth doing the changing. Cut two sizes larger than labelled, deliberately.

The fitted shirt

Cotton poplin from Paris, in the three colours a shirt should come in and one it should not. Washes at 30 and presses itself on a hanger.

The fine knit

Merino, cut narrow through the shoulder so it goes under a jacket. The single most reordered garment on the rail.

The silk top

For the evening half of the working wardrobe. Washes in a basin, which nobody believes until Konstantinos demonstrates it.

The overshirt

Somewhere between a shirt and a jacket, which is a category that did not exist ten years ago and now accounts for one purchase in eleven.

The one that is not white

Every season, one top in a colour that has no business working with the rest of the rail. Currently a green. It always sells out and we never learn from it.

On sizing

Sizing on shirting is the most misleading thing on the site, because a shirt cut to hang from the shoulder measures enormous flat and wears close. Every listing carries the actual garment measurements — shoulder, chest, sleeve, length — and those are the numbers to use. Marília will send them for anything, and will tell you which of two sizes we would put you in, which is a different question and usually the one people meant.