The focal point of a shirt is always the collar. The collar frames the face, and thus draws a great deal of attention. For this reason, it is vital that the collar always looks good, and that it complements the wearers features. This means that careful consideration should be made when choosing a shirt, a person must ensure that the collar matches the shape of the face. Therefore, it is essential to choose the correct size collar, and to maintain the collar in the fashion intended by the designer, this means using collar stays (or sticks, knuckles, tabs, bones, or collar stiffeners depending on where in the world you are from).

In terms of the types of shirts that you can buy, there are those with the collar stay sewn in, and those with pockets in which to insert a stay manually. We would advise that you always stick to the manual insertion variety, as stays often (unless made of metal) lose their shape over time. The only shirts that never require a collar stay are the soft-collared variety, normally those that button down.

The majority of people concur that the most expensive and well-designed shirts allow for exchangeable stays, it is the cheaper shirts that have the collar stays sewn in. The reason for this being that, if the shirts collar stay is damaged, the wearer will need to buy a new shirt, and so the cheaper shirts will receive more business in the long term. However, a sensible individual will always opt for a shirt with an interchangeable collar stay, as this will save money in the long term. Remember that with ever wash, a sewn-in collar stay will lose some of its sturdiness and thus give the shirt a less svelte appearance.

The best materials in which to buy a collar stay are the more rigid materials, such as metal or diamond. The better the quality, the less likely they are to lose shape and the more complementary they will be to the shirt. There are a huge variety of collar stays from which to choose, the cheapest costing a few pounds, the more expensive stretching to thousands of pounds in value. Clearly, the more expensive, the greater the likelihood that they will do their job correctly, and well our personal opinion is that the metal variation do the job best, they are less flexible have a heavier weight and give the collars a lot more of a sleek look than the plastic variety.

Collar stays come in different sizes, and it is important to choose the correct size. You must select the size depending on the size of the collar, and not on the height of the wearer or the size of the shirt people frequently mistake the importance of size, a problem which leads either to Elvis wings (when the collar seems exceptionally large), or floppy collars (because the stays do not reach the end of the collar).