Excellent vs Very Good on Vintage Cotton Button-Ups: The Collar Crease and Placket Standard

An Excellent-grade vintage cotton button-up has a collar that lies flat with no permanent creasing and a placket with intact stitching and no fraying at the buttonholes. A Very Good shirt has one or both showing early, honest wear — a soft break in the collar point or a slightly frayed top buttonhole — but nothing that compromises how the shirt looks on or functions. That's the dividing line, and it's narrower than most sellers assume.

We've regraded plenty of shirts a seller listed as Excellent that were, on close inspection, Very Good at best. The fabric felt fine. The color was fine. But the collar had a crease line that wouldn't press out, and the placket had gone soft at the first two buttonholes from decades of buttoning and unbuttoning. Buyers who paid Excellent-tier prices noticed. That's a return, or worse, a bad review that sticks to your store for months.

Excellent vs Very Good Vintage Cotton Shirts Condition: The Core Distinction

Excellent vs Very Good vintage cotton shirts condition comes down to two zones that take the most repeated mechanical stress on any button-up: the collar and the placket. Everything else — sleeve fabric, back yoke, tail hem — tends to hold up fine because it isn't handled every single wear. The collar gets folded, buttoned, and rubbed against a neck or a hanger thousands of times. The placket gets pulled, buttoned, and stressed at the exact same points every single day it's worn. These two zones show wear faster and more honestly than anywhere else on the garment, which is why we use them as the primary tier-separator for this category.

Under GradeThread's five weighted factors — Fabric Condition, Structural Integrity, Cosmetic Appearance, Functional Elements, and Odor & Cleanliness — collar and placket wear typically lands across two of them at once: Cosmetic Appearance (visible creasing, fraying, discoloration) and Structural Integrity (loose stitching, stretched buttonholes, fabric thinning at fold points). A shirt can pass Fabric Condition and Odor & Cleanliness with no issues and still get capped at Very Good because of what's happening at the collar and placket.

The Collar Crease Test

Collar wear on a vintage cotton shirt shows up in three ways, and only one of them is disqualifying for Excellent.

1. Lay the shirt flat and fold the collar down into its natural worn position, then open it back up.
2. Check whether the fold line disappears or whether a visible crease remains once the collar is flattened again.
3. Run a finger along the collar edge to feel for thinning fabric or a slightly frayed point tip.
4. Check the collar band (the strip of fabric where the collar meets the neckline) for ring discoloration or fabric thinning from repeated friction.
5. Compare both collar points for symmetry — uneven wear on one side usually means the shirt was worn with a jacket or tie knot pulling consistently to one side.

If the crease disappears when flattened and there's no fraying or thinning, that's Excellent-tier collar condition — it shows the shirt was worn and cared for but not worn hard. If a visible fold line remains after flattening, or the collar point has gone soft and thin, that caps the shirt at Very Good. If the collar edge is frayed enough to show white warp threads or the collar band has visible ring staining that won't lift, you're looking at Good, not Very Good.

The Placket Standard

The placket — the reinforced strip running down the front where the buttons and buttonholes sit — takes more repeated stress than any other part of the shirt. Every wear means pulling it open and closed, usually starting at the same one or two buttons.

Here's what to check, moving top to bottom:

• Buttonhole edges: Excellent-tier buttonholes show clean, tight stitching with no visible fraying or thread pulls at the edges. Very Good buttonholes may show slight softening or one or two loose threads, but the hole hasn't stretched out of shape.
• Button stress points: Check the fabric directly behind each button for thinning or small holes where the button has pulled against the fabric over time. Any thinning here that you can see light through moves the shirt to Good or Fair, not Very Good.
• Placket stitching integrity: Run the full length of the placket seam. Loose or missing stitches anywhere along it are a Structural Integrity issue, not just cosmetic — this affects grade regardless of how the fabric looks.
• Top and bottom button wear: These two buttons take the most repeated stress on any button-up. If they show more wear than the rest of the placket, that's expected and doesn't automatically drop the grade — but if the top buttonhole has stretched visibly larger than the others, note it.

A placket with tight stitching, no fraying, and no thinning behind the buttons supports an Excellent grade. A placket with minor softening at one or two points but no structural stitching failure supports Very Good. Once you see stretched buttonholes, thinning fabric you can see through, or loose placket stitching, the shirt has moved past Very Good.

Comparison Table: Excellent vs Very Good vs Good on Cotton Button-Ups

Why This Distinction Matters for Resale

Vintage cotton button-ups — chambray work shirts, western snap-fronts, 90s rayon-blend prints, oxford cloth dress shirts — sell across a wide price band depending on brand, era, and print, but grade tier is what buyers use to sanity-check the price within that band. A collector paying $60 for a Excellent-tier selvedge chambray expects the collar to sit flat and the placket to look untouched. If it arrives with a permanent collar crease and a softened top buttonhole, that's a mismatch between listed grade and actual condition — the textbook setup for an eBay