Our Design Formula: The Perfect White Dress Shirt

Happy Saturday everyone! I hope you’re having a lovely start to the weekend. We’re in Round Top for the weekend for a very good friend’s wedding. I’ll do a separate post on our TX bridal adventures separately! I’m writing this poolside early in the morning, absolutely elated by your response to the most anticipated drop of the year. Today is a special Saturday edition…

I’ve been dreaming, designing and ideating on the perfect white dress shirt since we started MM. I don’t think there’s a category that holds more opinions and more frustration. I certainly have my own perspective on what makes the perfect dress shirt…shall we discuss?

As a proud female designer who doesn’t like borrowing other people’s clothes, the first thing I knew was this was going to be called a women’s dress shirt. At any stage of your life, you can have the perfect fitting dress shirt in your closet. It doesn’t need to come from anyone else. There are key details of a well constructed dress shirt that often get overlooked with women’s shirting. I’m not sure why but I can confirm every detail was thoughtfully considered when we designed ours.

Stiff Interfacing

I think this is the number one reason women don’t prefer women’s dress shirts. Until ours, of course. For some reason, the interfacing is never stiff enough in women’s shirts. Interfacing is a layer of structured fabric that is inserted into cuffs, collars and center front plackets to give fabric more weight and strength during sewing. It prevents puckering and gives extra support to necklines and cuffs. In each of our dresses, there is a layer of interfacing between the self and the lining to support the neckline seams. Interfacing can be super light or extremely heavy, depending on your design. I think we increased the weight of our interfacing three times during the design process of our shirt. And now, it’s perfect.

A hidden center front placket

A lot of white shirt designs have extra button details to prevent gapping. Which is great in theory, but that’s never a full proof plan. Why? Because everyone’s apex (fullest part of the bust) falls in a different position. It’s impossible to place extra buttons in the exact place where your apex hits because it’s different on every woman. So what did we do instead? If you add an extra layer of the center front placket and hide the buttons completely. You’ll never notice if the most important few buttons are slightly higher or lower. To achieve the most seamless bust fit, you have to hide the buttons entirely. Magic!

******The measurement from where your neck+shoulder meets to your apex is called “high point of shoulder to apex”. Everyone’s is different and it’s the most important measurement you should know. We’re getting really technical today, but it’s necessary to understand. The more you know!

Perfectly curved shirttail hem

This is such an important detail to a longer woman’s dress shirt. A shirttail hem is the curved portion of the side seam at the bottom of the shirt. It can be shallow, deep long or short. I’m going to show you a revision we did from the original proto sample against one of the many reference samples we had. See the reference image on the left? The side split in longer and narrower. It’s much more flattering on women who are larger on bottom than on top. The image on the right is the first proto. The split was too wide, and the insert was too big. An easy correction but a detail that’s so important to get right!

The finished product: This photo is taken much further away but you can see we corrected the shape of the side split to be much longer and narrower.

I’m so proud of our new closet staple. If you have any sizing or fit questions, please DM us or comment below! There’s so much to discuss, I didn’t even get to our incredible stretchy silk pants. More to come on that later!

xx,
MM