I have a new delivery of some very special single-needle sewn deadstock Northern Irish linen shirts, adapted from a mainline Tender design dating to 2014. Here’s a piece about both versions.

The original type 430 Butterfly Shirt (in woad dyed calico with striped sleeves, at left in the photo above) was an experimental construction based visually around a British Rail uniform sleeved waistcoat in my own collection.

A lot of waistcoats in Britain and America were sleeved until the early 20th Century, when clothes became lighter and less formal. In modern formal waistcoats the fronts and the back neck are usually a matching or complementary fabric to the trousers and coat, but the back is a lighter weight, smoother and more slippery fabric (often matching the coat lining) to cut down on bulk and stop the garments catching on each other. In the same way this sleeved waistcoat was intended to be worn underneath a wool coat, and has smooth cotton satin sleeves and back, with melton wool fronts and neck facing, the only parts that would be visible.

Apart from the fabric choices, the pattern of a sleeved waistcoat also differs from a coat. A waistcoat’s shoulders have to sit underneath the firmer, wider shoulders of a coat and so are cut narrower. The back of the body, on the other hand, can be cut wider to allow the fabric to crumple and not cause tightness in tension with the coat. Waistcoats often have a belt or straps at the back to pull the waist in, while allowing the upper back and seat the extra volume of a wider panel.

So the original Type 430 shirt has narrowed shoulders, a wide body, and two pockets at the centre chest. Some versions, as the one pictured above, also have contrasting striped sleeves, recalling traditional sleeve linings of Savile Row suit coats, or the sleeves of some waistcoats.

After this, however, the abstract construction experiment, and the source of the shirt’s name, come into play.

Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?
Edward N. Lorenz (1917-2008)

I wanted to make a shirt without side seams, and I decided to use this as a starting point to see where the logic of shirt construction would take me. The Butterfly effect is the idea that one small change can lead to a completely different outcome.

A shirt’s panels, unlike a tailored jacket, are usually sewn up across the shoulders first, then around the armhole, and finally up the side seams, in one long sewing line from the hem all the way up the armhole and down the sleeve the cuff. If there’s no side seam, however, the sleeve cannot be sewn up in line with it, so the sleeve must be put in upside down, with the seam lining up with the shoulder seam. So the new sewing order is cut down from three to two operations: armhole, then sleeve and shoulder in one.

Previous Tender shirts had patch pockets sewn into the side seams, at the outside edges of the front panels, however without a side seam the pockets had to move into the centre. This in turn required the front placket (the folded edge where the buttons and buttonholes are sewn) to be turned outwards rather than in, so that the pocket panel could be neatly tucked underneath it.

This brings us to the new production of Weaver’s Stock Butterfly shirts. Weaver’s Stock is an ongoing project alongside the mainline, using smaller quantities of deadstock fabrics found at fabric mills that I’ve worked with other the years, who have ends of rolls which aren’t enough to make a full seasonal collection out of, but which are too good not to use. It’s also allowed me to experiment with brighter colours and patterns which might not fit into the garment-dyed mainline.

Alongside the fabrics, Weaver’s Stock garments are made on different sewing machines, using a variety of techniques not be available in the mainline. This latest batch is single-needle sewn, with a finer stitch count and more traditionally formal details than the original Butterfly. The Irish linens are preshrunk, so I was able to bring back the single-piece body cutting, and the original inverted pleat at the back neck.

A nice distinction between the two versions can be seen at the cuffs. The mainline Butterfly shirt has a cuff opening directly into the sleeve seam, positioned on top of the arm to run direct up to the shoulder seam. It is a short opening, based on workwear shirts, with pleats into either side, and a narrow false cuff faced onto the outside of the sleeve panel.

The Weaver’s Stock version, on the other hand, is constructed as a formal tailored shirt, with a separate mitred placket set to the back of the wrist, behind the french seamed sleeve. The opening is considerably longer, following the principal of dress shirts, which must open high enough for the cuff to be laid out completely flat for starching and ironing. The cuff itself is deeper, and a true cuff set onto the end of the sleeve, which has a pair of pleats above the placket.

A final difference is the buttons. Generally Tender shirts use relatively large, workwear-oriented buttons, and the buttons for the original Butterfly are particularly nice ones- they’re made of stamped metal with white linen covering, trapped into the rims of the two holes. When the garment is dyed they take the colour in just the same way as the rest of the shirt. The Weaver’s Stock version, following its more formal construction, uses smaller buttons more fitting to a dress shirt. These are a lovely set of creamy two-hole vintage melamine buttons that I bought from a tailors’ trimming merchant, but there weren’t enough for a full production, so I’ve been hanging onto them for a few years, waiting for the right garments. The tone and quality of them is just right for the linens, and they’re lovely to button up.

There is something particularly special about the linen covered buttons on the mainline version, though. As the shirt wears and fades, the buttons do too. Here’s my own woad dyed shirt, originally the colour of the button on the left, above: