The resurgence of 1970s sleaze propelled some real gems to the forefront of the menswear psyche, including solid gold watches from the heyday of Studio 54, and no shortage of blobby living room furniture. On the men’s tailoring front, the tide of disco-era inspo was equally fertile, bringing wider lapels, flowier trousers, floppier bowties, and, most noticeably, a glut of those great big pointy dress shirts favored by John Shaft and John Travolta in their prime. This was as welcome as it was inevitable.
During the previous decade, which was ruled by skinny suits and narrow lapels, shirt collars had been reduced to such vanishing proportions that wearing a lace from your Chuck Taylors as a necktie could have seemed like a totally reasonable option. Such is the nature of the fashion cycle, which tends to go as far as it can in one direction before hitting its apex and swinging back the other way. So it should come as no surprise that after several seasons of steady widening, the pendulum has now swung back towards the pleasant, timeless middle ground of the point collar.
If you’re not the kind of person who finds shirt collars super interesting, we feel you (and our sincere thanks for reading this far.) Unlike suit lapels or trouser pleats, the differences between most common types of dress shirt collars are so subtle as to be almost invisible to the untrained eye. Like so many areas of tailoring, however, subtle details can have an outsized impact on your look, and your collar is one of them.
“No article of male apparel is better equipped to enhance a man’s countenance than the appropriately shaped shirt collar,” notes Alan Flusser in his 20th-century menswear tome, Dressing the Man. “The choice of a dress shirt should be guided first and foremost by the appropriateness of its collar to the wearer’s face, and not by the vicissitudes of fashion.”
As Flusser or any other menswear guru will tell you, a shirt collar is like a frame for your face, and since every face is different, certain collar styles will look better on you than others. While the wide points of the ‘70s-style collar (also known as the “dagger” or “Barrymore” collar) might look sexy and cool on Burt Reynolds in Boogie Nights, they also run the risk of making you look like Paul Simon in Annie Hall.
That’s because, due to its lateral nature, a dagger collar tends to balance elongated faces and make round ones look even rounder. Conversely, the strength of the medium point collar is its symmetrical architecture’s tendency to flatter nearly any kind of face. Unlike the formal spread collar favored by Wall Street tycoons (most flattering for longer, thinner faces), or the more casual button-down collar, medium-sized point-collar dress shirts can easily look just as good with a navy blue suit and a tie as they do untucked with jeans and sneakers.
Does this mean we should all turn away from the funky, freaky embrace of the wide point collar? It does not. If the look speaks to you (and more importantly, flatters your face shape) there’s no reason not to take full advantage of the Barrymore’s unmistakable swagger. It does, however, provide a timely reminder about, to borrow Flusser’s term, the vicissitudes of fashion.
The shirt collar pendulum will continue to swing from wide to narrow and back again, but it’ll always come back to the moderating influence—and unmatched versatility—of the medium point.
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