A letter from a reader

At 68, I finally stopped stealing my husband’s shirt, because somebody made it for women

On Wednesday afternoons I play bowls, badly, with women I have known for thirty years. We take the bowls seriously and the tea break more seriously still. I mention this because of what happened on Wednesday.

Three different women asked me about my shirt, one of them mid-delivery, which at our club counts as a scandal. And when I told them the story behind it, Margaret put down her cup and said the thing I have been repeating all week.

Fifty years I have been borrowing Brian’s. You mean someone finally made us our own?

They have. So here is the answer, written down once, with photographs.

How it happens

First, a confession on behalf of most married women my age. For years the best shirt in my wardrobe was my husband’s. You know the one. The soft checked one, worn loose over anything, collar open, sleeves shoved up. It hung right, it asked nothing of my waistline, and it was never once actually mine.

Because the shirts made for us were always the other kind. Fitted, darted, cut to sit close and crease the moment you reached for a kettle. So we borrowed his, and put up with shoulders in the wrong place and buttons on the wrong side, and a low-level dispute over laundry rights that has outlasted several governments.

I had accepted that as one of marriage’s permanent arrangements.

What I had wrong

Here is what nobody had told me. Somebody finally made that shirt for women, and they made it better.

The Sigrid hangs relaxed and easy through the shoulders the way his does, but the collar sits properly on a woman, the buttons are on the right side, and the hem is curved and cut to be worn untucked, so it looks deliberate rather than borrowed. It is the shirt I have been stealing for fifty years, with the theft removed.

Mine is the Sigrid

It is from Manchester Boutique, a small British boutique that has been quietly dressing women like us for a few years now.

Mine is the light blue, and the check is the clever part. It is a tiny gingham, sky blue on white, the squares barely bigger than a match head, so from across the green it reads as a calm plain blue and only up close does it turn out to be a pattern. Loud enough to be asked about, quiet enough for a woman who does not do loud.

The details are quietly right. A proper pointed collar that behaves open or buttoned, small white buttons on a clean placket, and a soft washed feel from the very first wear, none of that cardboard stiffness new shirts usually make you serve time in. It is the sort of fabric that looks intentional slightly rumpled, which suits both my ironing schedule and my philosophy.

What happened at the bowls club

I wore it loose over navy trousers, collar open, sleeves pushed up, which is to say I wore it exactly the way I always wore his, and got asked about it three times before the tea urn. That never once happened in the borrowed one.

Since Wednesday it has done a market morning, an afternoon at my daughter’s, and a second bowls session, where we won, so it is possibly also lucky. And Brian asked if it was his. It is not, and that sentence has given me more satisfaction than the bowls ever has.

Three things I have learned since

One. Relaxed is a cut, not a compromise. A shirt can hang easy through the shoulders and still look sharp, if the collar and hem were actually designed rather than borrowed. His never managed both. This does.

Two. A tiny check is the quiet loophole. Micro gingham gives you pattern at arm’s length and calm at a distance. It goes with navy, with denim, with everything a plain blue goes with, and it is never once mistaken for a tablecloth.

Three. Untucked is the intended setting. The curved hem means loose is how it is meant to look. No tucking, no blousing, no fussing at the mirror. On, buttons, out the door.

About the price

I want to be straightforward about this, because it was the thing that made me hesitate.

The Sigrid is £25.95 at the moment. It was £52.00.

I have paid more for fitted shirts that lived their whole lives ironed and unworn. For the one shirt that gets worn three times a week and asked about at the bowls club, it is the hardest-working thing I own per compliment, and I say that as a Yorkshirewoman who audits such things.

I did what I imagine you are doing now and went and read the reviews before I ordered. Just over three hundred of them, sitting at 4.2 stars. Not the suspiciously perfect five you see on some websites, which if I am honest made me trust it rather more. One woman had written, “My husband keeps calling it his shirt. It is not his shirt. That is the entire point of it.” That was the one that decided it.

It comes in five colours, and I can see the argument for the pink, but I will keep making the case for the light blue. It is the one that reads calm across a bowling green.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were sat with a pot of tea and you asked me, this is what I would say.

If the best shirt in your house is legally someone else’s, it was never about his shirt being special. It was about ours being wrong. Get the one cut for us, wear it loose over navy with the sleeves pushed up, and enjoy telling him it is not his.

Two practical things. The sale is on now, and the first autumn stock is already going, so the middle sizes disappear first. It comes in sizes 6/8 to 22/24.

Fifty years of borrowing, ended by one shirt with the buttons on the right side.

Patricia