Attachment Theory:
A Strong Case for Soft Collars

As Pier Pietro Brunelli writes in the introduction to Gianni Pucci’s Details in Fashion Design: Collars & Necklines, “The neck is a form of nudity that one must know how to bring out from the clothed figure.” And that is what a collar does, turned up or down, pointed or round. A collar says: here is a neck, it shall not be chafed.

Sometime during the endless Instagram scroll of the last two years, I espied a certain emphasis on large, shoulder-covering statement collars. Shrimps, Kika Vargas, and Chopova Lowena made dresses and blouses for insolent schoolgirls, brightly coloured and boldly printed with sweeping collars to match. Soon after, the dresses were gone, leaving neckpieces hanging in ghostly suspension against the white background of luxury retail sites. Jil Sander’s silk charred biscuit of a collar, or Paco Rabanne’s white cotton collar with filigreed edges like dripping icicles. Simone Rocha’s puritanical black and white collars give the appearance of an angel, or perhaps an albatross’s wings, sitting weightily around the shoulders and falling in a long embrace over the chest. These collars melt into the garments they’re worn with, evoking a dissolute luxury; officious, yet slightly evil to behold. Erdem’s skewed and ribbon-trailing confection offered an alternative to the “I burn witches” collar, suggesting a child happy to show off the spoils of their play.

In contrast, smaller and more vibrant brands like Los Angeles-based KkCo Studio worked in a spectrum of ruffle-edged organza prairie collars with athletic detailing, styled over crew-neck shirts. Out of Austin, Texas, Psychic Outlaw designs one-of-a-kind detachable collars that seem almost too special to wear, cut from a puzzle of time-softened antique quilts. These silly and colorful collars owe more in spirit to Miu Miu’s 2010 necklace collars that featured naked ladies and swallows printed on their silky points. Unlike the more luxurious or discreet detachables, they want you to know they’re not attached, worn with t-shirts and sweatshirts and fastened with a floppy bow or plastic toggle. They’re precious and silly and cartoonishly infantile—like something worn by Baby Divine, well-accessorized with an enormous lollipop.

The detached collar is nothing new, but how we’re currently wearing it couldn’t be more different. “In Europe,” writes fashion historian Doriece Colle, “collars had been worn by the unpretentious since about 1520.” These collars, stocks, and cravats, in all their various silhouettes, were fastened around the neck according to fashion, class, and place. In the late 17th century, the French Revolution influenced the shape and dimensions of men’s collars. “Civil war and the guillotine,” according to Colle, brought an immense change to collar fashion—“rebels enlarged and heightened their neckwrapping to contrast with the stocks and ribbon bows of the aristocracy.” By the 18th century, men’s collars rose up the neck, encouraging a straighter bearing. Similar to a corset, the collar forced one’s posture to remain erect and appropriately dignified. More and more shirts and undershirts had collars attached. And as anyone with a neck knows, collars, in their constant rubbing and flop sweat-absorbing, tend to get remarkably yellow after a minimum of wear.

In 1825, one woman had had enough: A New York Times article from 1925 marking the centennial of the first “false” collar declares, “Mrs. Hannah Lord Montague, desperately weary of washing so many shirts a week for a fastidious husband, rebelled one blue Monday, seized a pair of shears, and removed a soiled collar from a comparatively clean neck-band.” Montague then sewed the collar back on, but an idea was born—the false collar, fastened with studs, quickly became a multimillion-dollar industry, with 15,000 factory employees in Troy, New York alone. The collar was made exclusively for men, but saved women countless hours of laundry.

So what do lavish and detachable collars mean now, if not to cut back on housework? Certainly they tie in with the trend towards high-necked prairie dresses; a cottagecore-adjacent aesthetic that dominates a certain channel of Instagram to different degrees of zeal. The detachable collars of recent years are soft, unstarched, without anything to fasten them but perhaps a loose tie at the front. They seem born of—and intended for—our pandemic lifestyle, cheeky in their modesty but hardly traditional. Whatever the outfit, a wide, loudly-printed collar can be looped around the neck to hide coffee stains or sleep t-shirts. A ruffled collar doesn’t belie fatigue or malaise. It has the effect of Phantom Thread’s Reynolds Woodcock, slouching downstairs with vest and dinner jacket worn over his lavender pajamas. These collars say, “I’m here, but I’d rather not be.”

The big silly collar trend also happens to dovetail with the pandemic surge in hobby sewing, as Isabel Slone writes in Harper’s Bazaar. Requiring only a small amount of fabric and a simple pattern, the detachable collar is a perfect project to test one’s mettle. “Amongst the many things she’s constructed,” writes Slone of the Toronto-based academic Kate Bauer, “a collar whipped up out of a thrifted Harley Davidson bedsheet.” Digital patterns have popped up in scores on Etsy, easy to print at home and then traced onto an old bedsheet, costing close to nothing but a little time and energy.

200 years after Hannah Montague removed her husband’s collar to save herself some work, we have again separated the collar from the shirt as a way to put ourselves back in contact with a certain kind of productive, self-serving labor. This feels particularly apt, as the pandemic has so profoundly changed our relationship to work, and also in how the collar is inseparable from our idea of work and class strata. The designation of the “blue-collar worker” came to common language in the early 20th century (1924 saw the origin of the term, whereas white-collar came a bit earlier, c. 1910), referring to the denim and chambray often used to make work clothes. By the ’20s and ’30s, Montague’s false collar fell almost completely out of style.

As reported in GQ, “strong collars” are making a comeback for men. “No more wimpy collared shirts in 2022. Go big, go pointed, go prominent.” TAKAHIROMIYASHITA TheSoloist. goes even harder with a white poplin collar that features hanging stud fasteners, its sharp points reminiscent of Montague’s false collar, with a whisper of fetish.

One of the first purposes of detachable collars, dickies, ruffs, and neckpieces was to protect the clothing, and perhaps add an extra buttress around the most sensitive part of our anatomy. Who among us hasn’t hoped for a bit more soft protection these past years? Brunelli compares collars to “the sepals of a flower”—the slender, often sharp leaves that surround the bud. I think of Kermit the Frog’s pointy jester collar, which he wears in the absence of other clothing, somehow seeming fully dressed. “In the clever jeu of dressing,” writes Brunelli, “the neck has always been considered a psycho-physical focal point of fundamental importance for every concept of elegance, or extravagance, of the human figure.” I can’t imagine we will wear these detachable collars for a hundred years, as we did Montague’s crispy little false collar, but perhaps we will continue to shape and make and wear them as transitional objects, protecting our necks until a time comes when we are ready to bare them again.

Naomi Skwarna is based in Toronto, Canada.