Figure 1.--The trend in England during recent years has been toward more informal, comfortable schoolwear. Boys at this school wear yellow polo shirts. |
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England has helped to set some school shirt styles. This seems to have been especially true of the more formal styles. TheEton collar was an English creation. The Eton collar was commonly worn for years during the late 19th and early 30th century. It was worn by boys a wide variety of schools. This was not a short, but rather a shirt waist worn with a detachable Eton collar. It does not look to have been a very comfortable style, but it was certainly widely worn. School uniform shirts after the demise of Eton collars were always standard pointed collars. Although the size of the collars have varied slightly with the times, we have never noted styles like button-downs or tabs.The standard school boy shirt after Eton collars disappeared during the 1930s were grey straight collared shirts. English school boys for years wore a classic grey shirt, a practical color for a boys as it did not show dirt like a white shirt. I'm not sure when bots began wearing grey shirts, but they were already wide spread by the 1930s. English school boys in the 1950s wore two basic styles of shirts, mostly long sleeves. The most common were the Rugby style where the buttons only went half way down the shirt. The other style was the regular shirt which buttoned all the way. Both styles were usually grey except for special occasions. There was a third less common shirt, the Aertex shirt, which was usualy grey with an open weave material. It was generally short sleeved and worn in the summer. The material in the 1950s was mainly of a wool mixture (Viyella), making for a warm, rather heavy shirt. Whilst the Vyella shirts are still available, at about L30 per shirt, they cost mist more than the more common L5 cotton shirts moat boys now wear. The Rugby stle declined in popularity during the 1970s. Grey shirts are still comonly worn, but not as universally as in the 1950s. They are still very common in preparatory schools and to aleeser extent for the older boys in public schools. Grey shirts are not very common in state secondary schools where sweat shirts are replacing traditional blazers. In recent years we have noted English boys wearing a variety of more informal shirts such as polp shirts. In some cases these informal shirts were worn seasonally.
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