The field shirt is an unstructured shirt or structured jacket, depending on where you draw the line. It is, either way, your quintessential mid-layer. It is suitable over a shirt or t-shirt — with a capacious cut in the upper body — but is unlined and bulk-free, so can be sandwiched between your shirt and jacket.
The collar of the field shirt on a full collar stand and has the general shape of a small jacket collar. It is cut to sit happily down — where a pleasing tendency to convexity is seen — or fully up, or halfway up and halfway down. There is structure enough for all and any position, and to look good all the while.
The buttons on the field shirt are horn — middling in colour and matte in finish — and each is a little different from one to the next. They are in that regard as if alpha-keratin snowflakes — such is the beauty of being a product of a high-grade natural material, rather than, say, a plastic replica.
There are two pockets on the field shirt, both at the chest. They are built into the chest-spanning seam that stems, in point of pattern-cutting fact, from the sleeve. One is a bellows patch; the other is an in-seam pocket, the stitching for which mirrors its counterpart. Bar-tacks strengthen the entranceways of both.
There's no arm or shoulder seam on the field shirt. No raglan, no in-set, no nothing. The absence of seam in the region means that the field shirt has the softest imaginable shoulder: for better or worse, it rolls over the outline of the wearer.
The cuffs on the field shirt are more coat-like in styling than shirt. They fasten with the help of an arrow-tipped tab and button. The relatively wide sleeve is pulled into this cuff with the the force of a gusset and the grace of a pleat — although the cuff is quite wide so the shirt is easily slipped off and on.
The field shirt has a curved hem that rises steeply at the side seams. The back of the body is slightly longer than the front.
And what cloth it is; cloth which, the more closely you examine it, the better it gets. Donegal writ through. The yarn is alive with tufts of unexpected shades, from off-white to charcoal. It is lambswool, softer than one might assume, and fairs mightily well in the wet and the windy.
