The detachable collar existed because laundry was harder than sewing

The shirt was a washable layer, not a visible garment

For a long stretch of European dress history the shirt was underwear in the literal sense: a washable linen layer worn between the body and the outer clothing, which itself was rarely if ever laundered. Its function was hygienic, and the parts of it that showed at the neck and wrists were the parts that had to be immaculate.

That arrangement makes sense once laundering is understood as heavy, skilled and expensive work. Cloth that could be boiled, bleached and beaten took the dirt; cloth that could not was kept away from the body by the layer that could.

The visible white edge at collar and cuff therefore carried a great deal of social meaning, since it advertised access to laundry. Keeping it clean was the point, and the rest of the shirt was of no interest to anybody who could not see it.

Separating the part that gets dirty first

The collar is where a shirt fails first. Body oils and perspiration concentrate at the neck, and the fold takes abrasion from the jaw and from the coat, so a collar becomes both soiled and worn long before the body of the shirt is finished.

The response, which spread widely through the nineteenth century, was to make the collar a separate object fastened to a neckband with studs, and often to do the same with the cuffs. One shirt could then be worn with several collars, and only the collar needed the heavy laundering that produced a crisp white edge.

It was a rational division of labour. Collars were washed, starched and shaped by commercial laundries in enormous numbers, and manufacturing them became an industry in its own right in a handful of towns that specialised in it.

Starch, celluloid and the pursuit of stiffness

The look required a collar to be stiff and glossy, which meant heavy starching and careful ironing, and both were laborious. The results were also uncomfortable, since a high starched collar restricts the neck considerably and softens as soon as it’s warm and damp.

That created demand for alternatives, and among the odder ones were collars of coated paper or of celluloid, which could be wiped clean rather than laundered and never needed starching. They solved the problem and they looked and felt unmistakably like what they were, and celluloid had the further disadvantage of being alarmingly flammable.

None of these solutions displaced the linen collar for anyone with the means to have their laundry done. They were economies, and they were understood as such at the time.

Why the arrangement disappeared

Several changes arrived at once in the first half of the twentieth century. Domestic washing became far easier, so laundering a whole shirt stopped being a significant expense of effort or money. Commercial laundry costs shifted. And attitudes to comfort and to formality moved, in ways that had a great deal to do with two wars and with the entry of sport and leisure clothing into ordinary dress.

The attached soft collar, which had existed for informal and sporting shirts throughout, simply moved up the formality scale as the stiff detachable collar moved out of daily use. That is the same one-way ratchet that has governed most of menswear.

The detachable collar survives in a few ceremonial and legal contexts, and in the wardrobes of people who prefer the look, and its neckband is why some formal shirts still have a plain band with stud holes rather than a collar attached.

The traces left in a modern shirt

A shirt collar is still a separate construction sewn onto a band, and it’s still stiffened with an interfacing to hold a shape that the cloth alone would not. The stiffening is now fused or sewn in permanently rather than achieved with starch, which is a change of method rather than of intention.

Removable collar stays are the other direct descendant, small strips slipped into pockets on the underside of the points to keep them flat. They are a miniature of the whole idea: a separate, replaceable component doing a job the cloth cannot do alone.

And the collar remains the first place a shirt wears out, which is why the traditional repair for a favourite shirt is to unpick the collar, turn it over and reattach it so the frayed edge is hidden underneath. That repair is now rare, and the reason it exists has not changed at all.