Now Testing: The Allen-Edmonds Dress Shirt

As brand extensions go, it's more sensible than the Macan and more tasteful than the Panamera, but it's unlikely to succeed like either. Last year, Allen-Edmonds expanded their "Made in USA" brand to include a range of clothing. Sizes, styles, and fabrics are limited.

The 2013 clothing range was on sale at my local A-E outlet a few weeks ago so I bought six of the shirts. I'll be wearing them for the fall and winter as I commute to a consulting contract, and I'll be comparing them to affordable shirts from Charles Tyrwhitt and Robert Graham as well as to higher-end stuff like Borelli, Brioni, and Turnbull&Asser.

Store retail on the five shirts I bought was $119 each; at the outlets they could be had for $29. I'm thinking the true-value price might be somewhere in-between. I'll start with the things that don't impress me. The fabric (100% cotton, no particular thread number or variety noted) is handsome and the color is sharp on all of my test shirts, but they are all exceptionally thin. They might be the thinnest fabric shirts I've ever worn. The buttons are unremarkable shiny plastic, small but thick enough to likely survive your local cleaners. There's a breast pocket, which is about as fashion-backward as you can get; that enough might have sunk the fortunes of these shirts at the Allen-Edmonds stores.

The cut is definitely American, which is to say that it's both loose and wide on me in size XL. Compared to any of the European shirts above or particularly the Robert Graham, these are fat-boy spec. Which is fine because there are plenty of us to go around. And I do mean around, ha ha.

Ha.

So with all of these negatives, what did I like? To begin with, that thin fabric is cool. Those of us who have been sentenced, however temporarily, to work in the female-dominated office-space of 2014, with its Panamanian approach to climate-control settings, can appreciate this, particularly if you're wearing a coat (in the suit/blazer sense) as well. The Tyrwhitt Classics, by contrast, are reassuringly thick and feel like they will survive a million launderings, but in the Ohio summer or fall sun one rapidly begins to feel like a turkey being given the slow roast until November.

The stitching is also very even and high-quality. I haven't found a bad or loose stitch yet. I've also certainly owned affordable shirts with worse buttons, and I want to call Robert Graham to account here because although many of the RG buttons have a mother-of-pearl covering they are all so thin and brittle as to be worrisome.

So far, the verdict is: decent go-to-work clothing, but nothing you'd want to wear for a moment anywhere "dressing up" was on the agenda. We'll see how they hold up through a thousand elbows-on-the-table meetings and report back.