Stitching down a shirt's rear pleat

[j]

I've seen shirts that have the rear box pleat (the center type that's usually 1.5"-ish wide stitched all the way down. I can see two possible ways to do it:

Iron the pleat perfectly, all the way down, then stitch one row underneath, right on the crease in the middle, all the way up as high as you can.

OR

Iron it perfectly, then stitch just under the edges of the outside of the pleat, so that it is stitched down with two rows just inside the edges through just the under-layers of fabric. I think this way would be better, because ironing the first one properly would be pretty difficult. If you wanted to be crazy about it, you could also handsew the middle edges together from the inside.

If you have no idea what I'm saying, don't worry about it.

My question is, has anyone had this done to a shirt to help slim it down? How did it turn out?

 

[Toiletduck]

how far down do you stitch it?

 

[j]

I was thinking all the way to the hem, as an interesting detail that would also help to slim the shirt a bit.

 

[Luc-Emmanuel]

Not that it will help or matter a lot, but some late season Helmut Lang shirts were constructed like this. I haven't inspected them to see how they did it.

!luc

 

[nmoraitis]

I had this done, but only on shirts with two box pleats (one on the left, other on the right). As you mention, ironing would be difficult for a centre rear box pleat. For shirts where I have the box pleat in the centre, my tailor recommends that the sides be re-hemmed. Doubt this info helps you much though.

 

[j]

Hmm. Maybe the best idea would be to either reconstruct the back without the pleat, or topstitch down the pleat instead. Thanks.

Luc, I'll see if I can find a HL shirt to look at. Thanks.