An archive, not a shop. Prowse & Hargood ceased trading and the company behind it was dissolved. This site restores the house's own published writing about its shirts, cloth and craft. Nothing here is for sale, no order can be placed, and no prices, ordering routes or contact details are reproduced. More about this restoration.
About Prowse & Hargood
Prowse & Hargood traded from 2003, selling English-tailored cotton dress shirts and the accessories that go with them direct to customers by internet and mail order. It is no longer in business. This page sets out what the house said about itself, in its own words where they survive, and what can be said about it now.
The house's own statement
The About page changed platform twice in six years and barely changed a word. It read:
Inspired by the finest traditions of shirtmaking. The history of shirtmaking is a long one. At its heart lies a passion for combining the very finest fabrics with artisan-like tailoring skills and a meticulous eye for detail. At Prowse & Hargood, we're inspired by these traditions.
A shirt says so much about the individual that is wearing it, which is why we believe there is no room for compromise. Comfort, elegance and luxury are all bywords for the Prowse & Hargood brand. Colour, texture and style all play a part in the distinctive look and feel of our creations. And whilst we believe in updating the classics, our range has no room for short-lived fad or fashion.
It is a piece of well-judged marketing copy, but it is also an accurate description of what the house actually did. The ranges were small and stable. Colourways were added and retired; the cut and the construction were not restyled season by season. A customer who bought a Tewkesbury shirt in 2003 and another in 2007 would have received the same shirt.
Selling without a shop
The house never had premises a customer could walk into. It described itself as "committed to delivering shirts, ties and accessories of the highest quality via the Internet and mail order," and that decision shaped everything else. There was a printed brochure, an online catalogue, and — unusually for the period — a substantial body of instructional writing published free on the site.
That last part was not incidental. If nobody can put a tape measure round your neck, you have to teach the customer to do it themselves, so the sizing page explains the two measurements that matter and why you round up rather than down. If nobody can explain across a counter what a non-fused collar is, you write a glossary. If a first-time buyer of a good silk tie does not know that ties are stored rolled and never knotted, you put that in a care guide. The instructional pages were the shopfloor.
What it made
Two men's ranges, a women's range, a bespoke service and three accessory lines:
- Tewkesbury — the formal range. Non-fused collars with a woven interlining, double cuff for cufflinks, plains, stripes, checks and specials, sizes 15 to 18.
- Tuscany — a fitted cut with a fused Italian collar that sits higher on the neck, built to be worn open.
- Bespoke — individually made to measure, over two hundred fabrics, patterns retained for repeat orders.
- Women's shirts — introduced after the men's ranges were established, in the same two-fold cotton.
- Silk ties, cufflinks and socks — handmade woven silk, a compact cufflink collection, and cotton socks in paired colourways.
The naming of the cloth
The house named its check patterns after East Anglian villages. Brantham, Lawford, Boxford, Felsham, Harkstead, Polstead, Saxham and Raydon all appear on the catalogue as colourway names — a Navy Boxford Check, a Wine Saxham Check, a Blue/Green Harkstead. Stripes took the same treatment, with a Yellow Taunton and a Purple/Navy Lawford. It is the kind of small internal convention that a house adopts and then keeps, and it gave a catalogue of otherwise interchangeable blue checks a vocabulary of its own.
Afterwards
The site's last substantive updates date from around 2011, after which the domain went quiet. The company was subsequently dissolved; the public record of that is held by Companies House, the UK registrar. No successor business trades under the name.
Between 2023 and 2024 the lapsed domain was taken over by an unrelated party and used to publish a large volume of automatically generated clickbait that had nothing to do with shirtmaking. None of that material is reproduced here, and none of its URLs resolve. What you are reading is a restoration of the shirtmaking site alone.
What this site is not
This is an archive, not a shop. Prowse & Hargood does not trade. Nothing on this site can be bought, no order can be placed, no prices are shown and no contact route is offered, because there is nobody at the other end of one. The original pages that existed only to take money or messages — ordering, basket, checkout, returns, delivery terms, the affiliate scheme, the brochure and mailing-list forms — have been deliberately left unrestored. Everything else, the writing about cloth and construction and care, is here.
For wider context on the English shirtmaking tradition the house placed itself in, the Victoria and Albert Museum holds an extensive dress collection, and Encyclopaedia Britannica's survey of textiles is a serviceable general introduction to the weaves named throughout this site.