Looking trendy is not always easy, especially when being the pinnacle of fashion means adopting extreme styles, like the close-fitting, perfectly crisp, and perfectly unforgiving stiff collars of the 1910s and 1920s. When starched to their limit, they could render their wearer quite uncomfortable, and, according to a few contemporary reports, sometimes even constricted gentlemen to the brink of faintness.
A major draw-back to extreme trends, is that when they are in full swing, it becomes much more difficult for those who wish to be stylish and practical, to find products that are both.
Example: An ad by J.C. Leyendecker,
Note the cutting fit of the stiff collar.
Mr. Art Helfant weighs in on the situation, in a 1921 issue of The Haberdasher:
It's no wonder that through the 1920s, soft collars slowly began to gain in popularity, and by the 1930s, their conquest of collardom was virtually complete. Infact, the same issue, in which Mr. Helfant's cartoon was printed, contains an article with the following headline:
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