A few years ago, I bought a white shirt at Thomas Pink. As it was the sales, I picked it up without thinking much about it. It was a pretty smart-looking shirt and I did notice that it was called The Traveller.
The shirt was two-fold cotton, non-crease, and had a breast pocket, a rarity with other work shirts I buy from Pink. Interestingly, the shirt had this velcro flap at the cuff of the right sleeve. I wasn’t sure what this was for as I never have seen it on a shirt before. I did think if it was to hold the sleeve length when it was rolled, but there was no velcro patch to latch it on to.
It wasn’t until a trip to the Pink store in York a couple of weeks ago that I asked the salesperson to tell me what’s with the velcro. He said it was a feature on the older Traveller shirts where you could place your Oyster card in, and when you are at the Tube station, you just place your cuff on the yellow Oyster detector at the gate.
Apparently, unbeknown to me all this while, the cuff had a pocket to place the card in, and the flap then covers the card to keep it in.
Clever or what.
Unfortunately this feature is no longer present in the Traveller series of Pink shirts. Still a comfortable shirt to wear, and doesn’t require ironing – which is my kind of shirt!
