UES Band Collar Shirt

This UES band collar shirt brings back the popular “Akiha” fabric, woven by different thickness and colour of warp and weft with a natural touch and an amazing texture.

This style of shirts originated with the invention of detachable collars. Detachable collars were popular in the 1830s and were designed so that collars could be washed separately from the shirts they attached to, meaning less frequent laundry days. Who wouldn’t want to do less laundry? While detachable collars haven’t had a revival, band collar shirts – the base that detachable collars were designed for – are still fashionable today.

The entire shirt is full of superior-quality details such as the natural shell buttons and uses an outstanding, highly skilled sewing process with a single-needle construction. Single-needle refers to the construction of an item as being wholly made with a lockstitch machine -which can include flat-felled seams. The counterpart to single-needle is a factory that uses automated equipment, machines that only do one type of seam.

Most factories use a combination of single-needle and automated equipment, but automated machines require sewing operators to be adept at using the equipment as opposed to the multi-step seam completion processes (like felling) that are required with single-needle. Thus, facilities that specialize in single-needle have more highly skilled machine operators than is typical because they must render the same results (or better) without the greater efficiency of automated equipment.

The cut is a modern slim fit. It is the perfect casual shirt for spring and summer to wear with shorts, chinos or lightweight jeans.

UES is a small Japanese label founded by Chuji Matsumoto in 1994. UES comes from the English word “Waste”, which means that Matsumoto-San wants you to make full use of each garment for as long as possible before discarding it. It is a small judgement of the concept of disposable wear that is so commonplace today in the world of fashion and from which Matsumoto-San disassociates himself completely.

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