An archive, not a shop. Prowse & Hargood ceased trading and the company behind it was dissolved. This site restores the house's own published writing about its shirts, cloth and craft. Nothing here is for sale, no order can be placed, and no prices, ordering routes or contact details are reproduced. More about this restoration.

Prowse & Hargood — Makers of Fine Cotton Shirts

Prowse & Hargood was an English shirtmaking house that sold two-fold cotton dress shirts, handmade woven silk ties, cufflinks and cotton socks by internet and mail order from 2003 until the end of the decade. This site preserves what the house published about its own work: the ranges, the cloth, the construction, and the plain-spoken guidance it wrote for customers on measuring, knotting and caring for what they wore.

The house and its idea

The proposition was stated once, early, and never really changed. "Inspired by the finest traditions of shirtmaking," the About page read. "The history of shirtmaking is a long one. At its heart lies a passion for combining the very finest fabrics with artisan-like tailoring skills and a meticulous eye for detail." Everything the house sold followed from that sentence — a small number of ranges, cut from good cloth, in colourways it chose itself, sold direct rather than through a shop.

What set it slightly apart from the Jermyn Street houses it admired was the route to market. Prowse & Hargood never had a shopfront. It was a mail-order and internet business from the first day, which meant that everything a fitter would normally do in person had to be written down instead: how to measure your own neck, how long a sleeve should be, what a fused collar is and why it matters, how to keep a silk tie from twisting. That written material is the most durable thing the house left behind, and it is the reason this archive exists.

The ranges

Two men's ranges carried the business. The Tewkesbury range was the formal one — the quintessential classic English dress shirt, cut for the office and for evening, available in double cuff for use with cufflinks and offered in plains, stripes, checks and a rotating group of specials. The Tuscany range was its relaxed counterpart, a fitted cut with an Italian collar sitting slightly higher on the neck, designed around the idea that a shirt should still look considered when worn without a tie.

Alongside them sat a bespoke service with over two hundred fabrics and a range of collar styles, a women's range in the same two-fold cotton, and the accessories the house treated as part of the same wardrobe rather than as add-ons: handmade woven silk ties, cufflinks and cotton socks.

Cloth, and the names on it

All the shirting was two-fold cotton woven from long-staple fibre — two yarns folded together before weaving, which is what gives a shirt its weight, its smoothness and its ability to survive a laundry cycle without going limp. The house bought, in its own words, "the best 100% cotton from around the world" and worked it into a consistent set of weaves: poplin, oxford, pinpoint, herringbone, twill and end-on-end. Those weaves, and roughly thirty other terms of the trade, are set out in the restored glossary.

One small habit of the house is worth noticing. Its check patterns were named after East Anglian villages — Brantham, Lawford, Boxford, Felsham, Harkstead, Polstead, Saxham, Raydon. A Wine Saxham Check and a Blue/Pink Felsham read like a map of the country between the Stour and the Orwell. It is a naming convention, not a claim about where the cloth was woven, but it tells you something about how the house saw itself.

What is preserved here

Four practical guides survive more or less intact and are restored in full, because they are useful whatever you are wearing and whoever made it:

• Sizing — how to measure your own collar and sleeve, with the house's own size tables in inches and centimetres.
• Product care — washing, drying and ironing cotton shirts, storing silk ties, and why a new shirt arrives slightly large.
• How to knot a tie — the Full Windsor, the Half Windsor and the Four-in-Hand, step by step as the house wrote them.
• Glossary — an A to Z of shirtmaking vocabulary, from bias to yoke.

The catalogue index maps the whole of what the house offered, range by range. For context on how dress shirts of this kind are constructed and collected, the Victoria and Albert Museum's fashion collection is a good general starting point, and the Textile Institute remains the standing reference body for the fibre and weave terminology used throughout this site.

A note on what this site is

Prowse & Hargood no longer trades. The company behind it was dissolved and there is no successor business, no stock and no shop. This site is a restoration of the house's own published material for reference and reading. Nothing here is for sale, no order can be placed, and no prices are quoted. Where the original pages carried ordering routes, telephone lines, a postal address or a returns promise, those have been removed rather than reproduced, because they would be false today.