The Collar and the Opening

Stitched to the neckline is a separate piece of knit, stiff enough to fold and stay folded. Below it the opening runs three or four inches down before a seam closes it off. Since that opening never reaches the hem, the shirt has to go over your head.

Replace that collar with a plain round neckline. The garment is now a T-shirt. Run the opening all the way to the hem. Now it is a shirt.

The knit can be flat jersey or piqué; the fiber can be cotton or polyester; sleeves come short or long; plackets carry two buttons or three, or a zip pull.

Between a T-Shirt and a Shirt

A T-shirt is a tube with a hole cut for the head and a band of ribbing around the neck.

Add a collar and a three-inch opening and the shirt starts doing something else. You get a second layer of cloth standing around the neck, and a neckline that adjusts.

A proper button-front shirt goes further in the same direction, opening the whole way down and cut from woven cloth.

In between those two sits the polo, knitted like the T-shirt and collared like the shirt.

The Name Came From India

People were saying polo shirt twenty-six years before Lacoste made his.

Modern polo descends from sagol kangjei, a Manipuri game played in the northeast of India for centuries before any English officer saw it. Where the English name came from is another language entirely: pulu, the Balti word for ball, which the British found easier to say. Officers stationed in Assam founded the first club at Silchar in 1859, then the Calcutta Polo Club in 1862. England saw its first game in 1869, a decade after Silchar, when Edward Hartopp of the 10th Hussars read about it in The Field and got a match up on Hounslow Heath. Players rode in long-sleeved cotton shirts. The collars flew up in the wind, so they pinned the points down or put buttons through them.

The oxford button-down comes out of those pinned collars. As Brooks Brothers tells it, John E. Brooks watched a match in England in 1896, noticed the pinned collars, and had the family firm put the idea into production four years later as the Original Polo Button-Down. The shirt itself is not in dispute: woven oxford cloth, full front placket, two buttons at the collar points.

The first garment sold under the name was a dress shirt. It borrowed one thing from the sport: the pair of buttons holding the collar points down. Although the horses are long gone, every oxford button-down sold today still carries them.

Lacoste Built the Shirt for Tennis

René Lacoste played tennis in the 1920s in the kit of the day: a long-sleeved woven shirt, worn with a tie. He had something else knitted for himself and wore it at the 1926 US Open.

A soft collar that lay flat and could be turned up against the sun. A buttoned opening at the throat. Short sleeves. Cotton knitted in a textured piqué. A back hem cut longer than the front, so a tennis player stayed tucked in through a serve.

In 1933, with André Gillier, Lacoste went into production. Once the polo players took it up as well, the name followed them across. Colors beyond tennis white arrived in 1951.

A 1934 example Lacoste has lent to exhibition is knitted in plain jersey, a year after the brand had made piqué central to the design.

Lacoste, Fred Perry and Ralph Lauren

Lacoste made the shirt. Fred Perry and Ralph Lauren came after him.

Lacoste's L.12.12, 1933. The production version of the 1926 tennis shirt. Lacoste reads the code as a parts list: L for Lacoste, 1 for the petit piqué, 2 for short sleeves, 12 for the prototype that got made. Lacoste's own product copy puts twenty kilometers of thread in one shirt and 2,367 stitches in the crocodile.

Fred Perry's M12, 1957. The 1952 shirt was the M3, launched at Wimbledon in white knitted cotton piqué with no tipping on it. Knitted in Leicester in cotton piqué. Two-button placket. Ribbed collar and cuffs, with the laurel wreath at the chest. Its back hem is level with the front. Running along the collar edge and cuff, the twin tipping comes with a story attached. Legend has it, Fred Perry says, that Lillywhites came asking for the plain shirt in club colors, wanted by West Ham supporters. That tipping is knitted in as a stripe of ribbing.

The M12 arrived in 1957, five years after the M3. The brand puts the name down to it being the twelfth prototype made during development.

Ralph Lauren's Polo, 1972. Lauren had been selling ties under the name Polo since 1967, and the mounted-player insignia had already run on the cuff of a women's shirt in 1971. In 1972 he put both on a mesh cotton shirt and released it in twenty-four colors at once, against a market where sportswear was mostly white, under the tagline that it gets better with age.

Lacoste sold a tennis shirt and called it a tennis shirt; Fred Perry sold a tennis shirt under a tennis player's name. Lauren sold the same garment with Polo written on the label, in twenty-four colors, to Americans who had never been near a polo field.

The rider on the patch was not his either. In 1920 the polo player Lewis Lacey had opened a shop in Buenos Aires selling shirts with a mounted player embroidered on the chest, a design that came off the field at the Hurlingham Club nearby. In the 1980s Lauren's company sued a Buenos Aires haberdasher over a polo-player mark, and the defendant replied that his was Lacey's, drawn in 1920, fifty-two years before Lauren's.

Lauren's label said Polo, and it sold in quantities the tennis houses had never worked at.

How the Collar Is Made

The collar and the cuffs are knitted before the shirt exists, on a machine the body never touches.

A collar cut out of body cloth comes away with three raw edges. Each one has to be turned under and seamed before the piece can go anywhere near a shirt. A knitted collar arrives finished on all four sides. It comes off a flat knitting machine in a 1x1 rib, along with the cuffs, while the body is knitted on a machine of its own, in piqué or in the structure the trade calls lacoste, which is a knit name and not the brand. The two meet for the first time when they are sewn together.

Ribbing runs around the collar edge and again at the sleeve band. Gildan's corporate blanks list the same construction as a welt knit.

When a placket ripples after a wash, it was made by the folded method: the body fabric taken back on itself and stitched through, one piece and one seam fewer. A set-in placket is a separate strip sewn into a slit cut in the front. Fred Perry's M12 carries one.

At the bottom of the slit sits a small reinforcing box or a bar tack, stitched across where the two edges meet the body.

The body sits on cloth between five and six ounces per square yard, heavier than T-shirt jersey, and that weight is where a polo gets its hang.

The collar stands up on its own account. Its rib is knitted denser than the body, and on better shirts a second layer or a strip of interlining sits between the two faces.

The long back hem went altogether. It was there for a tennis serve, and off the court makers leveled it with the front. Where it turns up now it is a layered panel in a contrast cloth, cut to show two or three inches below the front hem and sewn onto the outside of the body well clear of the hem seam.

Whole markets of polos built this way go straight to businesses placing orders: welt-knit collars, three-button plackets, a chest left clear for embroidery, and a tear-away label at the neck so the buyer can put their own name in.

Piqué

Piqué has a raised grid knitted into it. Closer to a honeycomb than a waffle. Run a thumb over it. The texture stands up.

Blank makers write breathability on the spec sheet for it. The raised points hold the cloth off the skin, and a damp patch travels outward along them until it dries wider and thinner.

Where the knit is flat jersey, the cloth sits closer to the body.

The blank catalogs list the two numbers separately, and they do not track each other. Gildan's 8800 is a flat jersey at 5.6 ounces per square yard. Gildan's own 64800 is lighter at 5.2 in double piqué. Port Authority's K500 is lighter again at 5, also piqué.

Terraces and Country Clubs

A collar and two buttons read as respectable at a glance, anywhere the shirt turns up. After 1952 it took two routes, and each one loaded the same collar with a different meaning.

In Britain a tipped collar came to read two ways at once, respectable to any stranger who glanced at it and at the same time a group name to the people who could read the colors. The shirt went from the tennis court to the terraces, taken up by one group after another: mods, then skinheads and rude boys, then punks, then the terrace casuals, then the rave crowd, then Britpop. Each group altered something small, and the tipping colors and the fit carried the differences between them. John Clarke, writing on the skinheads in Resistance Through Rituals, titled his chapter the magical recovery of community: a group whose actual working-class world was coming apart rebuilt it symbolically out of clothes, taking work boots and sports shirts out of their original settings and reassembling them into a uniform. Dick Hebdige gave the method its name for this field in 1979, in Subculture: The Meaning of Style: bricolage, the taking of ordinary objects out of their settings and the assembling of them into a new set of signs.

Across the Atlantic, knitted Lacoste shirts arrived as smart-casual wear, and golf club members and Ivy League students wore them under a sports jacket where a shirt and tie would have gone. The Official Preppy Handbook set that arrangement down as a costume with rules in 1980.

Put a terrace shirt beside a country club shirt and the tipping color and the chest badge are doing all the work.

Rugby, Golf and the Half-Zip

Away from those two routes, the collar and the placket turn up under other names.

A rugby shirt keeps the collar and the buttons, swaps the knitted collar for a woven one in a contrast cloth, and puts a body of heavy jersey under it in broad horizontal stripes. The collar is the part that survives the swap: woven, stiffer, and cut wide enough to take a grab in a tackle.

For the course, a golf shirt swaps the fabric for performance polyester and opens up the shoulder, because a golf swing takes the arm across the body in a way tennis never did. The collar stays, since a clubhouse expects one.

A half-zip drops the buttons for a zip pull, which runs the same three or four inches the placket would have run and stops in the same place.