There is a linen shirt in my wardrobe that I bought in a small shop in Sanary-sur-Mer in the summer of 2014. It was not cheap. It has been washed perhaps four hundred times. The collar has softened into something closer to a scarf, the ivory has drifted towards the colour of old paper, and one cuff has been re-stitched by a tailor in Nice who charged me eight euros and told me I should have come sooner.
It is, by some distance, the best thing I own.
The arithmetic of a good shirt
Divide the price by the wears and the shirt has cost me about forty cents a day. A fast-fashion shirt at a fifth of the price rarely survives a second summer; it pills, the seams twist, the buttons go. Bought four times over, it costs more and looks worse at every stage. This is not a moral argument. It is arithmetic, and it is the arithmetic on which the house was built.
What ages well
Natural fibres, first of all. Linen and cotton do not wear out so much as wear in; every wash breaks a few more fibres and the cloth gets softer without getting weaker. Then construction: a shirt with French seams and a properly set collar can be repaired almost indefinitely. And finally colour — pale, natural tones fade gracefully, where black and bright dyes go grey and tired.
The rule we work to
Everything we make has to pass a simple test: would we still want to wear it in ten years? If the answer is no, it does not go into the collection, however well it might sell this July.
The Sanary shirt is on its third set of buttons now. I intend to be buried in it.
