The white shirt: so timeless, so elegant, so simple, so easy to get wrong. One nurtures the fantasy of looking like a Lindbergh supermodel in the 1990s and yet ends up looking like a bank teller or a waitress. The professional élan a white shirt offers can quickly transmogrify into something utterly banal.
Lizandra Cardoni was so depressed by the versions worn by her clients working in the banking industry – too tight, badly fitted, full of ugly darts – that she quit advertising to study bespoke tailoring at the London College of Fashion. She has since become one of only two female shirtmakers in the UK, and one of a tiny number who work in Budd Shirts’ antique premises in Piccadilly Arcade.
The author’s finished shirt © Joshua Tarn
Today I have tasked her with creating the Dream Shirt, a process that involves a consultation and a couple of fittings, and takes around six weeks. Ordinarily the service requires a four-shirt order with prices starting, according to material and detail, from around £475 per shirt. Cardoni and Becky French, Budd’s new creative director, have asked me to provide a moodboard of my requirements; I have offered pictures of Linda Evangelista, Tilda Swinton and Jennifer Lawrence, who is often seen in a whisper-thin white shirt that is perfectly oversized. Having got the gist, Cardoni flips open a book of swatches and what seems like thousands of different styles. She recommends a lightweight Soyella, a Swiss cotton with a 170 thread count: “Like silk, but 100 per cent cotton so you can throw it in the wash.”
