Category Archives: Costume History

Geo. P. Ide & Co., Ide Brand, “Stratton” linen starched fold collar with a lock front for men.

Stratton Collar by Ide. The unusual looking curved extension on the wearers left side of the collar front helps to lock the collar into position which keeps it from bending with the wearer’s motion and pinching the skin of the neck or distorting the intended shape of the collar.
Continue reading Geo. P. Ide & Co., Ide Brand, “Stratton” linen starched fold collar with a lock front for men.

1871 patented Narraganset Collar Company “Elmwood” paper fold collar for men, with original box.

I purchased this early 1870s man’s card stock weight paper collar for study and sharing in 2018. It came in an exceptionally nifty full color box, such is often found in 1870s -1880s collars. I’m guessing originally the box would have contained more than one, as these collars are rather fragile. The box has both a color lithographed top picture and a side indicator of size, both pasted on the yellow top of the box.

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Places to buy Detachable Collars, get them laundered, etc.

Buying Collars:

Amazon Drygoods (Predates Amazon.com to which it is not related. It is a long standing historical clothing supply store, it sells new paper and cloth ready-made collars in historical styles, collar buttons and shirt fronts. The pressed paper and laminate , and can usually last through a 3-weekend run of a college play. The collars are made on the original 1860s machinery of the Reversible Collar Company, original maker of Linene collars, a paper-cloth laminate, which Amazon Drygoods purchased in the 1980s when after the R.C. Co. and it’s successor Gibson-Lee went under after over 100 years of business. So, though these are laminate, they are actually some of the most period-correct collars you can get).

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Some Books For Studying The Detachable Collar Industry History in the USA

I’ve been working on assigning dates to Detachable Starched Collars I own with information I’ve found through advertisements in Newspapers.com , Patent Records, clipped ads for sale on eBay, etc but was looking for more. Now I have run into some online copyright expired books and magazines that I think may help with doing this also. Many later collars have a lot of information about brand names, place of origin and manufacturing company names printed on the inside that help with this, and these books seem like they may be useful for narrowing down dates on collars by tracking the history of the name changes in the companies. Collar companies in the US were constantly eating one another, combining, breaking apart and vanishing through the whole second half of the 19th Century and first half of the 20th Century. Cluett for example went through all sorts of changes that may help date their collars. Some parts of these books seem to track a few of the dates of these mutations. If there is someone with better obsessive compulsive genes for working on forming this into cheat sheets and databases of collar names and dates faster, feel free to try. Meanwhile, if you are looking to “date” your own collars this is a good place to start.

Continue reading Some Books For Studying The Detachable Collar Industry History in the USA

1929 The Arrow Style Book & Wholesale Price List – Catalog of Cluett, Peabody & Co. Collars & Shirts

1929 The Arrow Style Book & Wholesale Price List

Continue reading 1929 The Arrow Style Book & Wholesale Price List – Catalog of Cluett, Peabody & Co. Collars & Shirts