Are you ironing your polo shirt collar the wrong way?

Dear reader,

We like polo shirts, but the collars seem to be temperamental.

For some reason these collars don’t seem to age well.

Or at least, this is what we thought until we discovered the trick.

We know many gentlemen have the same issue for polo collars. Many of them turned to polos featuring a regular shirt collar.

An old polo shirt collar will look like this:

Something’s not quite right with the shape of the collar. It looks stiff.

A new polo shirt collar looks like this:

It is more balanced and looks noticeably better.

For years we couldn’t figure out why the new and old looked different.

We even tried ironing our collars flat, hoping they would somehow fall down nicely. But polo shirt collars have no internal moulding (unlike dress shirts), and it did look good.

We also tried to blame it on the brand — “It’s Ralph Lauren, they don’t make good collars. Certainly, Lacoste should be much nicer.” (in reality, they’re almost identical).

Our “Aha” moment

One day, we inspected the collar of a new polo shirt and we noticed this:

The collar is folded in two from the neck, but then tapers towards the front. This means the polo shirt collar has to be ironed diagonally.

We had always ironed our polo shirt collars by folding them in two on the whole length. This is exactly what gave us this shabby looking collar:

The collar has the same width all the way to the button hole.

Small difference, big visual effect — another that the Devil’s in the details.

Now you know how to iron and fold your polo shirt collar, the right way.

Regards,

Edward