The English shirt makers Thin Red Line are offering a pretty remarkable deal today. Sign up for an account on their site, and all shirts are just £14.99 – or about $25. This is a 65% discount off their usual price of £45 ($75). In fact, there’s currently an additional 20% off for members that brings the price down to $20(!) per shirt. I ordered six shirts and paid, including shipping, $150.
These shirts are solid, traditional English shirts. The quality isn’t remarkable in most ways, more TM Lewin than Turnbull & Asser, but the half-dozen shirts I bought in the last crazy sale have been workhorses in my wardrobe. They do have some nice details, like gussets at the side seams and convertible double cuffs. Really this is an opportunity to score real basics – like solid blue and whites – for a great price.
My biggest complaints about the last round I bought (slightly baggy fit, stiff collars) have, they say, been addressed in a redesign that introduced a slim fit option and a softer interlining, so I’m very hopeful. From what I’ve read, the new “slim fit” is a moderately slim fit, not a dramatically slim fit, which is good for a medium-sized guy like me. More comparable, in other words, to Brooks Brothers’ slim fit than an Italian slim fit, or Brooks’ extra-slim.
So if you need to build a basic shirt wardrobe, you could do much, much worse than a few whites and blues in single and double-cuff variations and a few patterns from Thin Red Line.
(One technical note: I found that in Firefox, I had to hit refresh once on a few of the shirt pages before picking my options in order to successfully add stuff to my cart. And from what their customer support folks told me, some US debit cards have odd verification issues, so use a credit card if you want to avoid that.)
