There is a school in England called Eton College. For centuries it has educated the sons of the British aristocracy — future prime ministers, lords, kings. It is, depending on your perspective, either the finest school in the world or the most insufferable.

In the 1850s, the boys there did something small and quietly brilliant. They rounded off the points of their shirt collars. That was it – no manifesto, just a shape. A tiny gesture that said: we go to Eton, and our collars are different from yours.

That rounded collar — the club collar — eventually escaped the school gates and travelled through a century of menswear. English aristocrats wore it. Hollywood wore it. Thomas Shelby pressed his cap down in a Birmingham alley wearing one. It became many things to many people.

From the very beginning — when we were first figuring out what Delikatessen shirts could be — the club collar was one of four shapes we kept coming back to. Not as a reference, not as a costume. As something we genuinely wanted to reinterpret, to pull in a completely different direction.

That direction was not England. It was Japan. 

Issey Miyake believed that the most considered thing a maker can do is remove, not add. That a garment should disappear into the person wearing it. That the space between clothing and body matters more than the clothing itself.

We feel close to this idea.

Our club collar is very small. Smaller than you would expect. We hid the buttons — not as a technical exercise, but because we couldn’t stand the idea of anything interrupting the front of this shirt. No buttons catching the light. No detail competing for attention. Just a clean, unbroken surface.

We kept removing until there was nothing left to remove. If Eton invented the club collar as a mark of belonging, we at Delikatessen leave that for the wearer to decide.