Finding the perfect white t-shirt is notoriously is no easy feat.
Now Sunspel, the 1860-founded underwear specialist, has a solution: a bespoke one. Not joking, in the same way you are measured up for a Savile Row suit, head to their swanky new store at 23 Jermyn Street for a t-shirt fitting session.
I thought I ought to try it out. Inside, expect to wind down to the lower ground floor to find a plush consultation area (designed with the help of furniture retailer twentytwentyone) as well as a mini-museum which whizzes visitors through the company history, from its first Nottingham factory up to their most recent collaborations — the best including those with Casely-Hayford, Mr Porter and Edie Campbell.
Across from a posh coffee table (apologies, not just posh, but a Loop Coffee Table by contemporary designers Barber Osgerby, I am told) prepare to select the fabrication (Sea Island cotton or suprema cotton, sir?), shade, stitching, length and pocket shape of your dream top, then decide whether or not to add your initials. The power! After this, your measurements and choices are sent down to be cut and sewn at the Long Eaton factory, which has been Sunspel’s production spot since 1937. They start at £150, and take three weeks to produce.
“We’ve always made bespoke t-shirts – for Ronnie Wood and Charlie Watts of The Rolling Stones and for Daniel Craig in Casino Royale,” CEO Raul Verdicchi, an industry veteran with more than a decade’s experience at Zegna alone, tells me. “Now we are offering that service to everyone.”
As for a potted history, “the luxury T-shirt was underwear,” Verdicchi continues. “Then from the Korean War onwards, after the soldiers were photographed in their free time playing volleyball in them. Next James Dean and Marlon Brando started using T-shirts as an outerwear garment. It is all extremely important for us, and today the t-shirt is the number one category we have in our business.”
In a stitch? The pros can help.
