Charvet vs Turnbull & Asser

Two national approaches to a shirt

Charvet, founded in 1838, effectively invented the shirtmaker's shop and holds a range of shirting no competitor attempts: several floors of cloth held in stock. Turnbull & Asser has been on Jermyn Street since the nineteenth century and cuts a distinctly English shirt.

Both offer genuine bespoke (an individual paper pattern, a trial shirt, a minimum first order) alongside a much larger ready-to-wear business, and it is worth being clear which you are buying in either shop.

The garments

The English shirt is cut with room through the body, a longer tail, and a collar built to sit under a jacket and roll rather than stand rigid. Turnbull's three-button turnback cuff is its most recognisable feature.

The French shirt is cut closer and finished with a different set of conventions, and Charvet's advantage is less in the cut than in the choice: the range of cloth genuinely changes what is possible.

Which to use

If you know what you want and want it in something unusual, Charvet. If you want an English shirt to wear under an English coat, Turnbull.

Both are expensive and both require a minimum order for bespoke. Neither is the value option in shirtmaking. For that, look at the Neapolitan and Pugliese workshops, which make comparably by hand at considerably less.