Places to buy Detachable Collars, get them laundered, etc.

February 26, 2019 tara@costumes.org

Buying Collars:

Amazon Drygoods (Predates Amazon.com to which it is not related. It is a long standing historical clothing supply store, it sells new paper and cloth ready-made collars in historical styles, collar buttons and shirt fronts. The pressed paper and laminate , and can usually last through a 3-weekend run of a college play. The collars are made on the original 1860s machinery of the Reversible Collar Company, original maker of Linene collars, a paper-cloth laminate, which Amazon Drygoods purchased in the 1980s when after the R.C. Co. and it’s successor Gibson-Lee went under after over 100 years of business. So, though these are laminate, they are actually some of the most period-correct collars you can get).

Etsy Store: Fogey Unlimited (Sells vintage and new menswear including new linen collars in vintage designs).

Historical Emporium (Reenactor Clothing, lots of cool stuff.)

Etsy Store: Hidden River Finds (Vintage/antique clothing including many early 20th Century collars).

New & Lingwood (UK company that makes menswear including Eton uniforms since 1865, still makes collars).

Premiere Designs Historic Clothing (Victorian/Edwardian historical reenactor supply, including collars.

Darcy Clothing (Has historical style collars both made like original models. and in machine washable stays stiff with no starch models).

Barker Collars (UK Sells formal wear, including bespoke (aka custom-made) collars, and has a starching service.)

Luke Eyres Specializes in making parts for all those old and fun traditional British uniforms for sports (cricket of course) and professions (clerical, legal, military) that still use styles worked out 100+ years ago. As a result, they sell styles of collar that are not available in the usual Victorian/Edwardian reenactor sites in the US. So if you need legal or clerical bands or 19th Century style military collars etc, they have the lot.

USHist.com (Sells new made Victorian collar styles to reenactors).

Vintage Dancer page on “Where to buy detachable collars”, that lists even more places.

Laundering Collars:

Wizner Dry Cleaning NYC Dry Cleaner – Dry Cleaning Specialists in Fine Garments, Rugs, Linens, Theatrical Costume, Mascot Cleaning. Also does Starched Detachable Collars!

Barker Laundry Service (UK. The folks who did Downton Abbey’s Collars.)

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Costume History, Menswear

Some Books For Studying The Detachable Collar Industry History in the USA

February 10, 2019 tara@costumes.org

I’ve been working on assigning dates to Detachable Starched Collars I own with information I’ve found through advertisements in Newspapers.com , Patent Records, clipped ads for sale on eBay, etc but was looking for more. Now I have run into some online copyright expired books and magazines that I think may help with doing this also. Many later collars have a lot of information about brand names, place of origin and manufacturing company names printed on the inside that help with this, and these books seem like they may be useful for narrowing down dates on collars by tracking the history of the name changes in the companies. Collar companies in the US were constantly eating one another, combining, breaking apart and vanishing through the whole second half of the 19th Century and first half of the 20th Century. Cluett for example went through all sorts of changes that may help date their collars. Some parts of these books seem to track a few of the dates of these mutations. If there is someone with better obsessive compulsive genes for working on forming this into cheat sheets and databases of collar names and dates faster, feel free to try. Meanwhile, if you are looking to “date” your own collars this is a good place to start.