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.

Sizing: Measuring Your Own Collar and Sleeve

A house that sells shirts without a fitting room has to teach measurement in writing. This is how Prowse & Hargood taught it — two measurements, taken once, carefully — restored with the original tables.

How to measure your own sleeve length

To measure sleeve lengths for the perfect fit, take a tape measure from the centre of your shoulders — the bone at the base of the neck — across the top of the shoulder to the point of the shoulder. Then measure from the point of the shoulder down the outside of your arm to the point you want your sleeve to end, normally about one centimetre past the wrist bone, keeping your arm straight down by your side. Add both measurements together to get your sleeve length.

If the measurement falls between two sizes, allow for the longer. This is the house's own instruction and it is the right one. A sleeve that is a centimetre long disappears under a jacket cuff or is taken up at the gauntlet; a sleeve that is a centimetre short exposes the wrist every time you reach forward and cannot be fixed at all.

How to measure your own collar size

Place a tape measure around the middle of your neck, allowing enough room for the tips of two fingers to be inserted comfortably between the tape measure and the neck. That two-finger allowance is not a rule of thumb tacked on at the end — it is part of the measurement. A collar measured flat against the skin will be a size too small the moment it is buttoned and knotted.

Take the measurement in the afternoon rather than first thing, and take it standing rather than sitting. A neck is a little larger later in the day, and a shirt has to be comfortable at the point when you are least inclined to tolerate it.

The house's size tables

Prowse & Hargood shirts were made in collar sizes 15 to 18 inches, in half-inch steps. The tables below are as published.

Collar size

Sleeve length

Sleeve lengths were paired to collar sizes in a fixed progression, so that a 15-inch and a 15.5-inch collar shared a 34-inch sleeve, a 16 and a 16.5 shared a 35, and so on up the range. That is a standard ready-to-wear compromise: two measurements are enough for most people, and anyone whose proportions fall outside the pairing is the reason a bespoke service exists.

Why cut matters as much as size

The same collar size behaves differently in the two ranges. The Tewkesbury is the classic English cut with a fuller body and a non-fused collar; the Tuscany is a fitted cut with back darts and a fused Italian collar that sits slightly higher on the neck. If you are between fits rather than between sizes, that is the choice to make first, before the tape measure comes out.

Allow for shrinkage

Cotton is a natural fibre and shrinks slightly over the first few washes. The house included a shrinkage allowance in production, so a new shirt arrived very slightly larger than the size on the label and settled to it after a couple of washes. If you are measuring an existing shirt rather than yourself, measure one that has been through the laundry a dozen times, not a new one — otherwise you will be measuring the allowance rather than the garment. The care guide covers this in more detail.

Reference

Garment sizing designations for the UK and Europe are set out in the BS EN 13402 series, published by the British Standards Institution; neck girth is the defining measurement for men's shirts in that scheme, which is why collar size and not chest size is the headline number on a dress shirt. For a broader account of how body measurement translates into pattern, the Victoria and Albert Museum's dress holdings show the same two-measurement logic running back well over a century.