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.

Women's Shirts

The women's range came later than the men's. For the first year or so of trading, the page at this address was a waiting list — "We will soon be launching our exclusive range of women's shirts" — and by 2005 the range had shipped and the site's navigation carried Men and Women as equal top-level entries.

Why it came second

Prowse & Hargood started as a men's shirtmaker and its whole production specification was written around men's shirting: two-fold long-staple cotton, collar sizes in half-inch steps from 15 to 18, sleeve lengths paired to collars. A women's range could not simply reuse that. It needed its own block — different shoulder slope, bust shaping through darts, a different relationship between collar and neckline — while using the same cloth, because the cloth was the house's whole argument.

The pre-launch page shows how carefully the introduction was handled. Rather than announce a date, the house collected registrations for a preview and asked would-be customers what size they wore and how they had heard of it. That form is not reproduced here — it collected postal addresses and mailing references and there is nobody to receive them — but its existence is the record of a range being sized to demand before it was cut.

The range as it shipped

From 2005 the catalogue carried Women's Shirts as a section of its own, running to several pages of colourways, with a clearance grouping alongside it in the later years of the site. The house described its output plainly across the whole period as "quality formal cotton dress shirts, ties, cufflinks and socks" for men and women alike, and its positioning line for the women's range was the same one it used everywhere: pure cotton, formal, no compromise on cloth.

The construction vocabulary is shared with the men's ranges and set out in the glossary. Where a women's shirt differs structurally is chiefly in the darts — folds of fabric stitched to a point to shape the body — and in the collar, which is generally cut a touch smaller in proportion to the neckline.

The same cloth

Whatever else changed, the cotton did not. Two-fold yarn, woven from long-staple fibre, in the weaves the house used across everything it made: poplin for the flattest formal ground, oxford and royal oxford for weight and lustre, herringbone and twill for texture, end-on-end for a soft flecked solid. A women's poplin shirt from this house and a men's one were the same fabric cut to different blocks.

Fit, then and now

Women's shirt sizing has never settled the way men's collar sizing has: a men's shirt is sold on a neck measurement that is standardised across the trade, while women's shirts are sold on dress size, bust measurement or a house's own scale, which is why they are harder to buy by post. The British Standards Institution publishes the BS EN 13402 sizing designation series that attempted to bring order to exactly this problem. Anyone whose measurements sat outside a house block was, then as now, better served by a made-to-measure route.

Care

Identical to the men's ranges, because the cloth is identical: wash at 40°C with a light spin, remove any collar stiffeners first, do not tumble dry, and iron while still slightly damp. A shrinkage allowance is built into two-fold cotton production, so judge the fit after a few washes rather than out of the packet. The full instructions are on the product care page.

Elsewhere on this site

The men's ranges are documented in detail, the accessories — silk ties, cufflinks and cotton socks — were offered across the whole catalogue, and the catalogue index maps everything the house carried. As with the rest of this archive, none of it is for sale.