Tag Archives: Menswear

Costume History, Menswear

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

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.

New! Online Articles on Collars & Related Topics:

Costume History, Menswear

Litholin Collar Ads from 1906

The Litholin Brand of Collars seems to burst on the scene in a 1906 media blitz of small but inventive little ads in nearly every media market in the US.
Interestingly, lots of 1880s celluloid collar ads are of an overtly racist anti Chinese bent. This is the only one of these in this set of ads.

As 1906 ends this campaign of these single column mini ads gives way to a more varied group of large and small ads of different designs in 1907.

Costume History, Menswear

Parsons & Parsons Co. Celluloid Collar Pamphlets, Probably 1926 or later

I recently purchased these pamphlets showing celluloid collars. They show the available collar brand varieties of the Parsons & Parsons Company’s three sub-brands in a given year. I have been hunting through Newspapers.com trying to work out the year of these pamphlets. I have tentatively described them as post 1926 since I own one of the collars, a Par Brand, Amherst collar which has a 1926 patent date on it.

Kant Krack Collars Pamphlet pg 1
Costume History, Menswear

c.1910 Corliss-Coon & Co “The Style Book” of Detachable Men’s Collars And Cuffs

Small (4.5″x7″) booklet made for small retail firms to give to customers promoting the collars by the Corliss-Coon Company being advertised in Newspapers in 1910. The cover has been personalized with the retailer S.M. Myers & Company of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a retailer who occasionally is mentioned in newspapers during 1908 -1918.
May 20, 1910 half page Ad in the Lebanon PA Daily News, advertising the collars in the booklet as “new” indicating the probable date of the booklet as 1910.
Costume History, Menswear

Box of c.1918 Early 20th Century Military Collars

A recent eBay purchase of assorted starched linen military collars in an old box of a French brand of military collars.  Sizes are in centimeters, and the names are in French and English.  Most of the collars are straight bands and one is a curved band. This page has scans of the collars flattened out so you can use them to make your own straight or curved WWI military collars in these styles.

These are all band collars that button into the neck of a military tunic like this one seen on General Pershing c. 1918

It just forms a small edge in the interior collar, and meets in the front without buttoning closed.

1a Mako garant. 4 fach collar M 465 Uniform 40 36:

PDF of 1a Mako garant 4 fach collar M 465 Uniform 40 36

You can use these patterns above to make replicas of this curved military collar.

1a. Qual. 4 Jacky Uniform 37:

PDF of 1a Qual 4 Jacky Uniform 37

You can use these patterns above to make replicas of this straight military collar.

ST 70 Armee 37:

PDF of ST 70 Armee 37

You can use these patterns above to make replicas of this straight military collar.

17 Armee 45:

PDF of 17 Armee 45

You can use these patterns above to make replicas of this straight military collar.

Costume History, Menswear

1926 Celluloid, Parsons and Parsons, Par Brand, Amherst Collar

Celluloid collars provided a low maintenance, waterproof, alternative to starched linen collars, and were stronger than  paper ones.  Their high point seems to have been in the 1880s when they were new, but they still regularly sold through the 1920s.  Celluloid collars are given to cracking, especially after they age, so this one can’t be flattened and scanned for a pattern. However, you can use a bleach bottle and a pattern from a linen collar to make a replica that is stronger than celluloid, washable, and cheap.  

Students from the DVC Beginning Costume Design Class Sp2018 make plastic collars using bleach bottles:

Costume History, Menswear

The Latest Styles for Men & Young Men, Autumn & Winter 1942-43, Ferris Woolen Co. Chicago

1 Comment

This catalog of Men’s and Women’s Tailored Garments would have been published about 6 months after the US joined World War II in December 1941.  It is the sort of thing a store would keep on hand as a guide for ordering semi-custom made garments, even though with rationing on wool being rather severe, the trade in civilian garments would have been considerably curtailed.  Therefore, unlike pre-war catalogs of similar type, there are pages of officer uniforms and women’s work wear suits shown as options.  This type of catalog was usually used to order suits that were 90% mass manufactured, that were later finished to size on the cuffs of jackets and hems of trousers at the store where they were purchased after a fitting on the wearer.

Interestingly, the color images appear to all be printed using only 3 colors of ink: black, bright red and deep blue, which are cleverly used to create the browns, grays and dark blues of the woolen styles.  This makes for all the pops of color having a patriotic flavor, as well as ties in with the theme of “All American Styles!” which is featured in the catalog text and illustrations.  It also likely saved on ink, which would be viewed as both patriotic and practical.