The Tattersall of Life
I’ll bet just about everyone has one or two Tattersall shirts in their wardrobe whether they know it or not. Tattersall is the pattern of plaid or check that is woven into the cloth such that there is a faint cross-hatch of color on a usually white background. The checks created are small (quarter inch or so) and there are most often alternating colors of the defining lines. Thus, you might have dark blue and light blue or blue and red. Right now I have on a Tattersall shirt that has blue and brown alternating stripes. The best part about Tattersall is that it is that blend of formality and informality that makes a Tattersall shirt so multi-functional.
Since we are beyond the era of the IBM “White Shirt Manifesto”, it is fair to suggest that a Tattersall shirt is unlike a plaid shirt in that it can be worn with a tie of almost any design (preferably one whose colors incorporate or at least compliment the stripe colors in the Tattersall). What makes this work so easily is the white background (hats off to Tom Watson of IBM on that one). White shirts pretty much work with any tie. In fact, one of the great Wall Street sartorial insults is to say to someone, “that may be the only tie I’ve ever seen that doesn’t go with a white shirt.” So, A Tattersall shirt can be a perfectly good shirt and tie kind of shirt.
I, myself always get button-down collars on all my shirts. While I think a regular spread collar can look fine with a tie on, I rarely find myself liking the look of an open-collar shirt without a tie and with the collar points flaring or spreading out to unknown ranges. For my money, a button-down collar may be a bit more trouble in the morning, but it more than makes up for it by keeping your collar look like its where its supposed to be for the rest of the day. Tattersall shirts look particularly at-home with a button-down collar. That implies that a Tattersall shirt is the perfect casual shirt for the man about town.
The technicalities of Tattersall include the vertical stripe of thread, which is called the warp. It’s actually a weaving term, not a Star Trek speed of travel. The horizontal threads that add the complimentary and alternately contrasting color are called the weft. I can’t be certain what multiple wefts are called but I imagine something akin to a woof of weft, or maybe a wall of wefterlies. Whatever it might be, I’ll bet the folks at the Greenwich Country Club know the answer.
Tattersall lives in that space where it can be very down-to-earth, but worn with a gingham, it screams Ralph Lauren, and yet while worn with tweed, you can be a member of any club in New York from the Metropolitan Club to the Union League Club. Speaking of New York clubs, I was once a member of the New York Athletic Club, but that was long before I had figured out the whole Tattersall thing. That was when I lived strictly in the land of oxford cloth (strictly white and blue, never yellow, pink or God-forbid, ecru).
I remember when I began in banking in the summer of 1976. I owned two suits, a navy and grey pinstripe. I made the mistake of buying two new suits at SIMS (“an educated consumer is our best customer”, but watch out for the naive ones). I can only claim temporary insanity for buying a light blue suit (not even seersucker) and a tan/salmon number that I probably wore once before my training program mates laughed me out of the office. If you do not have a father to advise you on such things, or, if like me, you were figuring it out on your own, you learned dressing for success by trial and error. Lots of trial, even more error, in my case.
During that first summer in New York, I think I had a wardrobe of ten work shirts, five white Oxford and five blue Oxford. By my calculus, I figured I was ok unless I forgot to go to the laundry every Saturday without fail. My summer mentor, a Harvard man, told me that as a young man I should try to get two days out of each shirt to cut down on my laundry bills. I tried it once, but found that I tended to wear my shirts hard and they looked like an unmade bed by the end of the day. I hadn’t quite sorted out the right amount of starch so as to look sharp, and keep a crease for two days. At $1.00 per laundered shirt (no respectable banker wore wash n’ wear), I figured it was a cost of doing business.
Now after forty-three years in business, I have a dozen suits (six navy and six grey), three sports costs, six pairs of dress slacks and 120 folded and wrapped dress shirts. That’s right, I limit myself to 120 in New York (I probably have 50 more in California and 20 more in Ithaca). Sometimes, when I get around to wearing a shirt in Ithaca or California, it’s been sitting so long that it seems like something from a museum with yellowing of the starch visible at the edges. That never happens in the New York collection, because I work hard to rotate them. Nonetheless, I occasionally surprise myself by picking a brand new shirt that I bought two years or more ago.
The one thing I can be very confident in saying is that the Tattersall shirts get worn in rotation about twice as often as any other shirts. I do occasionally feel in a white, blue or striped mood, but I am ALWAYS in a Tattersall mood. I actually hold myself back in choosing a Tattersall in order to save it for a weekend or an upcoming trip. I should probably buy more of them, but like everything in life, part of the joy comes in the rarity of the event. Tattersall just seems to be worth the wait.
I always feel good in a Tattersall shirt and I don’t really know why. Make that a crisp, freshly laundered and lightly starched Tattersall shirt and I feel like I can conquer the world. I occasionally even find myself wondering if others have noticed and admired my Tattersall shirt. I never feel that way in any other kind of shirt.
I have no idea why Tattersall seems so special to me. I can’t imagine writing 1,000 words about any other kind of shirt. There are other pieces of clothing that are worthy of stories, but no other shirts that I can think of. Jerry Seinfeld did a whole show on the puffy shirt. I bet I can do 500 words on pleated dress shirts (buttons or studs) or synthetic wicking cold-weather undershirts, but I think the Tattersall stands alone. I wish there were more Tattersall-like things in my life.