Clerical collar

A clerical collar, clergy collar, or, informally, dog collar, is an item of Christian clerical clothing. The clerical collar is almost always white and was originally made of cotton or linen but is now frequently made of plastic. There are various styles of clerical collar. The traditional full collar (the style informally described as a dog collar) is a ring that closes at the back of the neck, presenting a seamless front. It is often attached with a collaret or collarino that covers the white collar almost completely, except for a small white rectangle at the base of the throat, and sometimes with the top edge of the collar exposed to mimic the collar of a cassock. Alternatively, it may simply be a detachable tab of white in the front of the clerical shirt. The clerical shirt is traditionally black (or another color appropriate to a person's ministry rank, such as purple for Anglican bishops), but today is available in a variety of colors depending on the wearer's preference. When clergy are delivering sermons, they sometimes attach preaching bands to their clerical collar. According to the Church of England's Enquiry Centre (citing the Glasgow Herald of December 6, 1894), the detachable clerical collar was invented in 1865 by the Rev. Donald Mcleod, a Church of Scotland (Presbyterian) minister in Glasgow. By 1840, Anglican clergy developed a sense of separation between themselves and the secular world. One outward symbol of this was the adoption of distinctive clerical dress. This had started with the black coat and white necktie which had been worn for some decades. By the 1880s this had been transmuted into the clerical collar, which was worn almost constantly by the majority of clergy for the rest of the period. Henry McCloud stated that the collar "was nothing else than the shirt collar turned down over the cleric's everyday common dress in compliance with a fashion that began toward the end of the sixteenth century. For when the laity began to turn down their collars, the clergy also took up the mode.