The window: hip bone to the top of the fly
Stand up straight, arms down. The hem should finish somewhere between the point of your hip bone and the top of your trouser fly.
That is roughly four or five centimetres of usable range, and everything inside it reads as deliberate. It covers your waistband when you move, it does not interrupt your leg line, and it works tucked or loose.
Use the landmarks, not the label. Two brands' size mediums can differ by three centimetres in body length, which is most of the window.
Too short fails quickly
Above the hip bone and the shirt has no margin. Reach for something on a high shelf and it rides up and stays up, because there is not enough fabric below your waistband to hold it down.
It also removes the option to tuck, which quietly halves what the shirt can do. Short-bodied tees are usually a cost decision rather than a design one — less fabric per unit — and you feel it in exactly the situations where you would not want to.
Too long fails harder
Past the top of the fly and the hem starts cutting across your thigh, which visually shortens your legs and lengthens your torso. This is why a long tee can make you look shorter even when nothing else about it is wrong.
The exception is a genuinely oversized cut, where extra length is paired with a wider body and a dropped shoulder so the whole silhouette scales together. That works. A regular-fit tee that is simply too long does not — it just reads as somebody else's shirt. Worth knowing the difference between the two.
The tuck changes the arithmetic
How you wear it shifts what length you need.
- Fully tucked — length barely matters for looks, but you need enough below the waistband to stay put through a day of sitting down and standing up. Short tees untuck themselves.
- Half tucked — needs a hem in the window. Too long and the loose side hangs like an accident rather than a choice.
- Untucked — the window is the whole game. This is where a centimetre either way is visible.
If you only own tees for one of these, buy for the untucked case. It is the least forgiving.
Where Tarsah lands
The Grand Tee is a regular fit that drops straight from the shoulder and sits at the hip — deliberately inside that window rather than cropped short to save fabric or run long to chase a silhouette.
It is a boring specification to write down. It is also the one that decides whether you reach for the shirt on a Tuesday.
Check it standing, then reaching
In front of a mirror: stand normally and find the hem against your hip bone, then raise both arms. If it stays roughly where it was, the length is right.
