The straight shirt stay is the cheapest shirt stay construction available and often come in packs of four.

They are the most basic and this allows for ease of use.  The straight shirt stay is a single ribbon of elastic material with clips at both ends.

The straight shirt stay is worn on the outside of the legs. While the simple construction will avoid any frustration when you put them on, the two clips are often poorly constructed. More often than not, the clips will lose their grip of your shirt or they will break.

The Y-Clip Shirt Stay is an improvement on the straight shirt stay construction.

While not a great advancement of keeping your shirt snug, the Y-clips offer more anchor points on your shirt and in theory more holding power.

The two clips can be seen as an advantage over single clip construction, but again, the quality of construction is often not much better than the straight shirt stay.

Now, instead of having to worry about two clips coming undone or breaking, you now have three per leg.

The Y-Clip shirt stay is more expensive than its predecessor, but material quality is still the same. You are paying a few more dollars for an extra clip and an extra few inches of elastic.

The stirrup shirt stay can be seen as the third generation of keeping your shirt tight to your body.

Someone probably had a very bad experience with a straight shirt stay coming undone and probably received a shot to the groin from a renegade clip; with this new, painful experience, this someone probably had the idea to get rid of the clips on the socks and introduce a more reliable design.

As the name implies, the stirrup shirt stay no longer has the sock clips.

Instead, the bottom portion of the shirt stay is worn around the foot like a stirrup of a saddle. It is certainly an improvement and reduces the risk of injury to the groin, but quality of construction and material are not much better than the straight and Y-clip shirt stay.

This shirt stay does not keep in the tradition of the previous three, but is claimed to be better. The shirt stay belt (also called “shirt locks” or “sticky belt”) entirely replaces the principle of vertical tension with horizontal tension.

After you put on your shirt, the belt is worn around the hips and tightened.

Then you put on your trousers as you would normally. (Remember that trousers are worn higher around the waist; the shirt stay belt and your trousers and belt do not overlap).