Dress shirts with a spread collar have a distinguished history – particularly dating back to the 1930s, when the likes of Douglas Fairbanks and the Duke of Windsor were fans.
The spread collar has a wide gap between the collar points, so wide in fact that the points of the collar can almost form a horizontal line sitting across the wearer’s neck.
Dress shirts with spread collars look best on men with thin faces and can be especially flattering to a long neck and a longish rectangular face. The horizontal nature of the spread collar balances against the naturally emphasised vertical lines of the dress shirt’s construction and the V of the suit jacket.
Spread collars should be worn with a large necktie knot. Ideally this means a tie of a decent width or a relatively bulky material, tied with a Windsor knot to avoid the asymmetry of the easier and more common four-in-hand knot.
But if you are among those who are a little hesitant to try the spread collar, and especially if you have a fuller, wider face, there is a halfway house option in the form of the medium spread collar – a style that is certainly wider than the conventional drop-points collar but lacks the explicit statement of the full spread.