John Smedley Isis Polo Shirt

The Isis is a short-sleeved polo shirt knitted, not woven, from very fine cotton yarn. Its body is plain and smooth, without logo or pocket; the collar is fashioned, in the knitter's term, and sits softly at the neck above a three-button placket. It is cut long in the body and loose through the chest and sleeves, what its maker calls an easy fit. Held to the light, the cloth has the slight lustre of a long-staple cotton.

It comes from Lea Mills, at Lea Bridge near Matlock in Derbyshire, founded in 1784 by Peter Nightingale and John Smedley on a brook that washed the yarn and turned the machinery. Under Smedley's son, who ran it from 1825, the mill set out to make finished garments, chiefly fine merino underwear; the company says it installed Britain's first fully fashioned knitting frames there, and its Jay Bird trademark dates from 1876. Menswear and outerwear followed in the 1890s.

In 1932, the company says, it introduced a three-button polo shirt knitted in Sea Island Cotton. It was not the first such shirt: the tennis player René Lacoste had worn a short-sleeved knitted cotton shirt at the 1926 US championships, and would put his own on sale in 1933. Smedley's was knitted at a Derbyshire mill, in Sea Island Cotton. The firm describes the shirt as one of the defining pieces of British menswear, and the Isis is the model it names as dating from the 1930s.

The company is still owned by the Smedley family, now in its eighth generation, and still knits at Lea Mills, which it calls the oldest continuously working factory in the world. It holds Royal Warrants from King Charles III and Queen Camilla. The Isis is made there in thirteen colours, from cotton now grown in California, and it is still the fine, plain, three-button knitted shirt of the 1930s.