Since their launch in 2008, Proper Cloth has been selling custom dress shirts through their online store to customers around the world. Using a number of sizing methods, each shirt is custom made and hand-assembled and then delivered to your doorstep in about 2 weeks. Proper Cloth guarantees a perfect fit; they’ll alter or remake your first shirt for free!
Proper Cloth has a really slick user interface that offers hundreds, if not thousands, of fabric and pattern choices to start with. Once you choose your fabric, you can then customize your shirt with Proper Cloth’s amazing, and almost overwhelming, customization interface. I say overwhelming only because the number of options is simply staggering…it was difficult to decide on exactly what I wanted. You can choose from around 27 collar design options, 11 cuff options, 4 pocket options, 8 front options, and much more! Plus, as you’d expect with any custom shirt, you have the option to pay an additional $10 for a monogram.
The reason Proper Cloth is so confident in their fit is the number of custom sizing options, with extremely helpful advice and videos to help with your sizing. You can even go to their showroom in SoHo, NYC to get measured in-person. The sizing method I chose was the Smart Size quiz, which is a quiz that asks 11 questions to leverage statistical algorithms and Proper Cloth’s data vault to predict the perfect fit for you based on your answers. It was a very interesting process that really seems to get a feel of how you like to wear your shirts, whether it’s untucked, tucked, fitted, or loose, etc.
Check out a few screenshots from Proper Cloth’s Smart Size quiz to get a taste of the questions they ask:
Proper Cloth was kind enough to offer Gear Diary a $150 credit to their online store in order to experience the dress shirt sizing, designing, and guaranteed perfect fit for myself. After hours of searching through all of the fabric options, I ended up choosing the Thomas Mason Aqua Multi Check fabric, a light fabric with 100s 2-ply thread count. It’s a beautiful gingham check pattern that employs different shades of light blue and aqua that can be dressed up with a tie or worn untucked in a casual setting.
It took me way longer than I’d like to admit to get through all of the options and finally decide on the custom shirt design. This was my first custom shirt, and I had to research a lot of the choices Proper Cloth was giving me. Thankfully, they have an excellent support page that explained all of the shirt design options so that I could make an educated decision.
Here’s an overview of my custom order:
