The Hunt Is On

I haven't had an item of clothing to obsess over for a while, so I guess I was due. The other day I was downtown and went into Macy's to poke around, something I do maybe two or three times a year these days. This is a good time to check out clearance stuff, so that was enough of an excuse.

The clearance dress shirts were stocked standing up in boxes, arranged by neck size. I found a very nice Ralph Lauren shirt in gray end-on-end fabric, one of my favorites for dress shirts and in a color I could use. EOE fabric has tiny alternating lines of colored and white threads that you can see by looking at it really closely, but when viewed from a few feet away it appears as a textured solid.

Ralph's dress shirts fit me very nicely, and this one also had a spread collar, which is my preference for dress shirts, partly because it looks more dressed-up, and partly because the collar and knot of the tie form a sort of horizontal counterpoint to my longish, oval face. Most men's style advice I've seen says that a spread collar looks good on just about any man, and if you look at dressed-up guys on TV or even on the street you'll see that this tends to be accurate.

Unfortunately I could only find the shirt in neck sizes 17 and 17-1/2. I still wear a 16 after all these years, so I'll have to keep looking. At the clearance price it's worth it to expend some effort checking other Macy's stores that are T accessible. And it's something to do with my copious free time...