Trends in Men’s Fashion Shirts: The Reverse Collar

Fashion shirts with contrasting reverse collar

In the world of fashion shirts it isn’t good enough anymore just to provide shirts that are slim fitting, or shirts that are made of high quality cotton.  There are simply too many brands out there that have recognized that men appreciate a dress shirt that fits their body the way it should, and that they deserve the highest quality material in the world.  So what separates the hot fashion brands from the imitators?  What makes the difference to men who are looking to drop serious money for a dress shirt that they expect to love?  It’s all in the details.  These days fashion shirt makers are pushing the envelope of the what men expect in a dress shirt with new looks that play on familiar aspects of the traditional dress shirt we all grew up wearing. 

These new fashion designers take an old staple of the dress shirt and flip it on its head.   Take the collar for instance; we are used to seeing a few variants of collars, like the button-down collar and a variety of widths of to suit a range of tie knot styles.  But these types of collars have been available forever (well since Brooks Brothers debuted the button-down collar in 1896) and aren’t going to make anyone take notice of your fashion sense.  If invisibility and anonymity are your thing that’s fine, but today’s fashion designers have turned these details into a chance to express your fashion sense and show your flair for the dramatic.

Take, for instance, the Parisian fashion house Franck Michel.  They’re a leading force in French men’s fashion and a great example of a company making fashion shirts that stand out from the crowd because of their unique approach to old concepts.  Their lineup contains shirts with all manners of double collars, mixing and matching fabrics to make the collar stand out apart from the rest of the shirt.  These double collars however are yesterday’s news in the high fashion world of French design.  What Franck Michel is doing next is pushing the collar in a new direction, quite literally.  The new line offers collars with an extra flip, called a reverse collar.  This previously unseen design is a collar that folds back up and then is held together by stylish buttons on either side.  This allows an interplay between two colors of fabric as we now are privileged to see the fabric choice on the underside of the collar, which in the case of trendy French fashion shirts, is of course a contrasting color, and often has a bold pattern.  These reverse collar shirts are just starting to make a splash stateside, and are as unique as you’ll see in the world of fashion dress shirts.