Shirts; Breast Pockets are a Must

It is such a simple rule for shirt-makers: always include a breast pocket. That's it. Nothing fancy or complicated, no monograms or reinforcements, just a simple pocket for holding sunglasses, credit cards or a pair of in-ear headphones when you're not using them. Most retailers understand this rule but apply it inconsistently so here is my comprehensive guide to shirt suppliers.

Let’s start with the high-street brands. Marks and Spencers offer a breast pocket option in their Made To Measure range (they also offer monograms, which counts against them). Buy off-the-shelf from M&S, though, and you take a chance; many of their shirts lack pockets.

The Savile Row Company offer pockets on at least some of their shirts. Importantly, they also offer non-iron material (as do M&S) across part of their range. In our environmentally conscious age, it doesn't do to buy shirts that need to be ironed (and who wants to spend time ironing if it can possibly be avoided?).

TM Lewin have several non-iron button cuff shirts which all seem to have breast pockets. The range is small (is seven colours really enough?) but the shirts look good and seem to be excellent value for money (assuming you get them during a sale - a plain white shirt sounds good at £30 but isn’t quite as exciting at the normal price of £89).

For something a little more individual you could try Tailor Store, an online retailer of custom-made shirts. Their offering is basically the same as M&S’ Made to Measure service but with far more bells and whistles. You can not only choose fabric, cuff and collar style, you can have epaulettes, angled front plackets, elbow patches, contrasting cuff, collar or fronts and optional matching boxer shorts. This is the very definition of a comprehensive service but they don’t have non-iron material. The hunt goes on.

iTailor advertise non-iron custom shirts but their site requires Adobe Flash which I don’t use on my laptop (and I’m not installing it just to play with a shirt design website).

Charles Tyrwhitt has a fine selection of non-iron shirts. Pockets are an optional extra, bringing a basic shirt to about £42, but overall they look like a pretty good compromise between cost and features.

Finally, if you’re after something a little more exotic, or you just fancy taking a trip to visit your tailor, how about MySingaporeTailor.com. They’ve got just about every option you could want (except, as far as I can tell, non-iron) and you can use them as an excuse to visit Singapore.

Personally, I like Charles Tyrwhitt’s non-iron shirts with the optional breast pocket. All (or at least most) of the shirts I’ve seen on the sites listed above look good (some are clearly awful) so it comes down to ease of ordering, maintenance and use; Charles Tyrwhitt seem to offer all of this at a decent cost. Jackpot.