Explaining the origin of collarsfrom @fineasjackson

Transcript

Look at your shirt. The sleeves cover your arms. The buttons hold it shut. No, look at the collar. It doesn't close anything. It doesn't hold the shirt on your body. It just folds over and sits there. So why is it on every shirt you own? This is Chasing Beauty episode 64 rank today, we're looking at the design behind the collar. To understand the collar, you have to understand what a shirt used to be. Before the fifteenth century, shirts didn't have collars at all. They were simple undergarments, Open necklines, long sleeves, and made from linen or hemp. The collar first appeared somewhere in the late fourteen hundreds. And it wasn't the royalty who introduced it. Priests and ministers wore stiff tunics with high scratchy necks. Adding a strip of fabric to the shirt underneath kept the tunic from rubbing their skin raw. But because the collar was the only part of the shirt that showed above the tunic, it became a small marker of who you were. And once the collar meant something, the nobility wanted in. By the sixteenth century, the European aristocracy had taken that simple strip of fabric and turned it into something absurd. Massive rough collars, pleated discs of fabric.