T-Shirts Unravelled
threadbase.com
threadbase.com
In any case, it's quite fascinating how sometimes old tech is simply better than what we have today.
I don't see many 45yo people wearing 20yo clothing -- there are some of course, but not that many to be a "phenomenon" one would notice.
Here's a good introduction on loopwheeled shirts from Japanese repro brands.
http://www.heddels.com/2014/03/an-introduction-to-loopwheele...
The Flat Head and Tezomeya are also other examples of loopwheeled tees.
They're £58.33 plus £10.00 shipping which converts to roughly $100 US. I'm not that frugal, but Jesus this shirt better be tip top quality and last longer than 6 months for $100.
Well don't I feel stupid, I didn't know this pretty well known thing. Thanks for the share. :)
Like the article suggested, materials in clothing these days cost very little. I used to own two Ralf Lauren Polo Cotton T-Shirt. One Cost $200 the other $100, both were a sensation to wear. I still have them today and i love them. The problem is i got them as gift. I could never afford to buy them myself. I just wanted simple styling and plain colour, nothing fancy, and decent quality materials like those Polo Shirt i have. I tried a few Start up who claim they uses premium quality but they surely dont match those.
For now i continue to stick to Uniqlo for pretty much everything. They sure are not the best, but I do find them value for money, at least comparative speaking.
A search for ループウィール turns up some hits, like the Barns brand.
This is also more or less true of wool, in fact. It's not the hot water that shrinks a wool sweater, it's getting it damp and agitating it. The hotter it is while agitating, the faster it will shrink; being fully wet (as opposed to damp) mitigates the felting process somewhat. It appears that cotton is the same way (although its shrinkage is less extreme and less permanent than shrinking a wool sweater!). You can certainly get a wool sweater wet with hot water without shrinking it at all. If you're careful, you can wash it in hot water and agitate it to wash it properly, as long as you don't overdo it, without shrinking it. With some treated wools you can tumble dry on no heat, although I wouldn't recommend it; but under no circumstances should you wash a wool garment (in whatever heat of water) and then put it in a dryer with any heat at all. That will shrink it.
I knit, so I have extra awareness of how many people just don't know what to do with wool these days, and I have to educate them if I want to give them something I made. :)
I hate you.
.
(hey, you downvoters: that's a joke)
I organize an annual conference [1]. All of our attendees get a free tshirt. We purchase all of our tees from a single manufacturer (say American Apparel) and let the attendee tell us the size they want before we finalize the order.
The problem is that attendees often don't know what size will fit them, and sometimes guess wrong and end up with a poor fit. Anything you could offer us to help here?
I understand the desire for adults to have a shirt that fits, but I think that falls squarely in the bucket of "nice to have". As a parent of a child that doesn't fit any of the sizing charts, being able to predict what size of what brand will fit my kid would be a "must have"! Kids also tend to go through clothes a lot faster than adults, making the potential savings of getting a good fit far greater.
PS. Could you include "stretch" t-shirts, like this one (just an example):
> http://www.iwantpants.com/polo-ralph-lauren-stretch-cotton-w...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2459720/Tommy-Hilf...
Then you finally find a shirt which is just the "right" length at the store, and three washes later and it is too short... But you cannot buy the next size up since you need more LENGTH not shoulder width.
Very few brands make t-shirts which are 2x-tall (as opposed to 2x-large, where both the length AND width increases). A medium-2xtall would be like the unicorn of t-shirts.
The sizes should be: S, M, L, 2x, 3x, etc & S-T, S-2xT, S-3xT, M-T, M-2xT, etc.
It took me forever to find a fairly athletic fit (slim but not skin tight) in my height (6'2" with a long torso) that also doesn't have logos or random graphics (solid colors and maybe a pocket is all I want).
If you have a favorite choice it'd be great to know it and have more options.
*Full disclosure: I worked at an Eddie Bauer in college.
Try RibbedTee.com. Esp. the Micro Modal shirts. Yes, they are expensive. But they last and fit.
After removing the laundry, take your t-shirts and stretch them yourself, one by one, when they're still slightly wet. Grab them with two hands symmetrically, stretch horizontally, moving your hands down along the shirt. Do the same vertically, and with the sleeves.
Do not use a machine dryer, just a regular standing dryer like [1].
Put your t-shirts carefully, symmetrically on the dryer, and once dry, put them on a hanger. If you follow this, you will not have to iron them at all.
Source: been doing this for 4 years and I didn't touch the iron since. I have all t-shirts 100% cotton (though I buy only high-grammage ones) and they all seem brand new and ironed (the only exception being one particular brand whose collar looks bad unless ironed, I stopped buying that brand). YMMV of course.
[1] http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41oWjx2Q-mL._SY300_.jp...
After removing the laundry, we fold everything neatly, and leave them stacked on top of each other for 30-60 mins. Than we dry them with a standing dryer.
Haven't ironed t-shirts or jeans since we got married.
Interesting, I never considered this a hack. Noone told me this, but I always do it. Ironing is never needed. I do it with pants too.
Just before hanging them, while they are still wet:
Grab each t-shirt from the top with both hands, then do a couple of violent whip-like movements. This has the same effect of stretching the fabric so that no ironing is needed.
"The crack a whip makes is produced when a section of the whip moves faster than the speed of sound creating a small sonic boom."
(I agree that is a strangely satisfying thing. It does make hanging the wash up for drying slightly less tedious...)
How does this contraption dry clothes? Looks like someone tried to take a clothesline indoors.
On a less sarcastic note: Water has no problem evaporating at room temperature. A batch of clothes is usually dry overnight. In fact you can even dry stuff at below-zero temperatures through sublimation.
While most modern dryers offer a choice of temperatures, the big knob mostly controls a humidistat-based target. I personally equate the "very dry" setting with "shrink beyond usability".
I'd expect that removing clothes while still damp would be more important to avoiding shrinkage than reducing the heat, but I'm no T-shirt scientist. (T-shirtician? T-shirtologist?)
"The biggest determinant of shrinkage is whether the shirt went in the dryer or not. (We wash and dry all t-shirts using a warm wash and normal/warm dry cycle)."
I'm pretty sure that all of the three dryers we've had in the last twenty years had a permanent press setting that does exactly that. Our current one certainly does, and it's just the front-loader that was on sale at Home Depot, nothing fancy.
Thanks for explaining something I was always curious about in the laundry room but forgot about by the time I reached a computer.
Yeah, fair enough. Come to think of it, I don't even know why I know this. Our current dryer has something on the display that says something to that affect, but our previous ones were old school analog dials without explanatory text, yet I always knew that "permanent press" meant it starts out hot and ends cool so the clothes don't wrinkle.
Cotton is just a lousy fiber. On the other hand, wool is a strong and resilient fiber. It also never needs to be washed provided it isn't stained.
My wife knit a wool sweater for a close friend of mine who spent 6 months as a bosun on the tallship the Lady Washington (the Interceptor in the Pirates of the Caribbean). Fresh water is scarce on a tallship so showers were infrequent. He came home during Christmas and I smelled the sweater which he claims he never washed and it smelled fresh. Surprisingly, it also kept him warm and dry on the open ocean. I later learned that Irish fishermen have been wearing wool sweaters at sea for generations.
Wool is the fiber of the past and future.
You're mixing things up. Cotton is stronger than wool, cotton shirts last many years longer than wool shirts. It's less noticeable with sweaters simply because their fabric is thicker.
On the other hand, wool can be more comfortable to wear because it retains more heat and absorbs moisture better.
Turns out cotton is actually stronger than wool. I suspected that since all my cotton shirts are perpetually wrinkled the fibers are weak.
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bZuKb5...
The "manufacturing variance" chart jumped out at me as looking fairly unnatural: there's a variation in width or variation in length but very little points that mix. Then I noticed that we're talking about just over half an inch in each direction.
How much of this effect is variation in your measurement?
Measuring clothing is really, really hard to do in a consistent way. In my original plan for the project, I was going to hire 5 task rabbits to measure everything, then throw out the min and max and take the median of the remaining three numbers. It didn't work. The average taskrabbit had a standard deviation of error of 0.3" for each shirt. That might have been OK if the errors were purely random, but there was a lot of systematic error as well.
Eventually I was able to find two people who could provide consistent measurements. They were within 0.1" of my measurement for each item. When there was a difference of more than 0.1" we would remeasure the shirt. In general I feel good about the data we published.
Do you really mean median here? Or did you intend to write mean?
If you're planning to take median, there no need to throw out the min & max first.
I wonder if there are any companies that sell inexpensive custom t-shirts? Provide your measurements, specify desired fit, neck type, color, and fabric, and order exactly what you want.
As someone very hard to fit for pants (28" waist and cyclist thighs), I would be thrilled if you also do this for jeans and shorts.
There are some companies that have done tees and polos though - Polos - VASTRM. Button ups - Blank Label, Pacific Issue, Proper Cloth. Tees - SonofaTailor, Threadmason.
The Uniqlo shirts are a cotton/polyester blend while the BR shirts are 100% cotton, which explains the help that durability of the synthetic materials provide.
It would be great if we could get some data on which brands have the most and least variance and which brands expand and shrink the most over their lifetime.
Fatal error: Namespace declaration statement has to be the very first statement in the script in /home/thebarproject/webapps/codecon_wp/wp-content/plugins/zencache/zencache.inc.php on line 13The fact that his own website doesn't seem to work at all is just very ironic.
I presumed that's what themartorana was referring to about why they might not bother to fix it, and why I thought it would be useful to point out that according to the error message you got, themartorana's site is broken in a different, more fundamental way.
Edit: I'm curious about the downvotes. Are people appalled at my lack of taste in t-shirts? :)
What if the fabric was rotated 90 degrees upon manufacture, wouldn't this eliminate this problem?
The shrink pattern is related to the orientation of the thread build of the fabric used is it not?
Fit is almost a philosophical decision. Most companies only have five sizes (XS-XL) and the goal is probably to accommodate as large of a % of your customer base as you can with each of those five sizes. Most designers either use themselves to build their sizing from, or use a fit model, someone that literally is paid to stay the same size year round and give input on the fit.
After the decision on who, exactly, you want to design to, you need to decide how the individual garment should fit. eg. some streetwear might have a 4" longer shirt from the high point shoulder than mine, if they like that long, baggy look. Some styles, like James Perse, may want a laid back, beach vibe, or cater to an older demo that might want a more forgiving shirt, so they'll want a few extra inches around the waist.
In our case, I'm a very consistent medium -- almost every brand I'd expect my friends to buy from fits me well at a medium -- so I tailored our shirts to myself. We then started with what is a fairly standard grade rule to go up and down the sizes, and then after many, many batches, fine tuned each size to feedback from our customers.
So -- a lot going on. There is no way to standardize what a "medium" is across brands (and some companies don't even use the same terminology!)
The frustrating part, as a consumer, however, is when a brand doesn't have consistency between batches of the same style, colors within the same style, or between styles!! eg. I have a pair of Levis (huge fan..) on right now that I have the same exact wash, and style, but the 31 waist is MUCH bigger than the 32 waist. In this case, they were probably sewn in different factories, and they don't have tight enough tolerances in QC, or something. Between styles happen because a big company like Nike, for instance, may have 100 designers, who may not want to re-use design elements/blocks from one style to the next - and would prefer to fit / design their new tee how they see fit. But as a consumer, I expect all Nike medium shirts to fit the same, so that is frustrating.
Turns out, sewing things by hand, and dying, pre-shrinking natural fabrics, etc. is really hard. We've been working on our processes for three years, and are incredibly proud of what we've built... but we learn new ways to improve every day!
Their charts expose this onconsistency. Some brands Mack Weldon, is more consistent than say American Apparel.
Even when objective measures like pants waist size in inches, typically a size 32" actually 34" --I guess to make people think they are thinner tan they actually are.
Wash as usual and then hang on a plastic hanger until dry. So, don't use a dryer and just let them hang, starting when they are still wet from the washing.
Also works when hand wash and rinse but don't squeeze out much of the water, that is, hang them while they are still wet enough to drip.
Also works with knit polo shirts.
The size charts is a real eye opener. I know that Abercrombie carries smalls that fit me fine, but Zara was an unknown to me. Apparently, their tees are also reasonably priced and look pretty good...
Thanks for the post!