I’ve got to tell you, if you’re looking for a very well made, nicely tailored polo shirt, keep reading. I have one of these shirts from the first, limited run and it is amazing. It comes from Grayman and Company, a Canadian company who make bespoke suits with tactical features. A couple weeks ago, they released their new merino polo shirt and it’s even better than mine. In fact, I’m upgrading and one of my sons is going to get the one I currently have. He just doesn’t know it yet.
They added some very discreet loops for comms wire management and a pass-through channel in the collar band if you want to hide a small wired mic under the collar flap.
Besides those features, this is very clearly a polo shirt designed by tailors. Merino fabric is usually in a jersey knit and you can find plenty of merino polo shirts at REI or by your favourite outdoor brands in jersey, but this one is in the more sophisticated ‘pique’ textured knit which is even more breathable and has a more refined look that goes well with suits and blazers. The only other merino pique polo shirt I could find on Google was by Ralph Lauren’s Purple Label and it’s $495. They also opted for a longer/deeper button placket than usual and constructed their shirt collar like a dress shirt collar, so it has structure and slots for collar stays. The collar stays they use are carbon fibre.
The whole package makes for a polo shirt that definitely looks more put together than a normal casual polo shirt and might be a good alternative to a dress shirt for some occasions. And it’s pure merino, so it’s temperature-regulating, breathable, odor-resistant (you can wear this thing for a week or more without washing it) and machine washable. The fabric is Italian, from Reda 1865, and the tailoring/construction was all done in Italy, so they ship it directly from Italy.
You can check it out at polo.grayman.company. They have a pretty useful fitting calculator so you can experiment to find the right fit.
