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Brilliant post. This explains exactly why some T shirts I buy fit great in the chest after buying and are shorter and wider after one wash.
Doesn't work on Safari with Ghostery and uBlock. No text loads, but the plots do.
I'm not sure this is a complaint worth worrying about if I'm them...
FWIW you personal website linked from your profile doesn't either:

  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 13
He probably doesn't care either.
To be fair, that's a server-side error that will probably always occur (so the site is effectively permanently down), not like the original client-side error caused by users configuring their browsers in a way that site owners might consider hostile or otherwise not worth supporting.
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It's not considered hostile by the site owners https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10959363 in fact it's already fixed. My original comment was in the spirit of helping a fellow programmer find a possible bug. On the other hand I found themartorana's comment to be particularly snarky wrt a large proportion of web citizens that are increasingly worried about their privacy.

The fact that his own website doesn't seem to work at all is just very ironic.

I do see that these particular site owners don't mind their users using Ghostery and uBlock. Some may not go out of their way because they see it as their users denying them ad revenue or analytics (the user is "hostile".) A similar situation happens with NoScript, where some site owners view Javascript as a basic, easily-met prerequisite to using their site, and will do nothing to help users who don't want to enable JS.

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.

uBlock is killing some of our graphs. Fixing this is on our todo list (although not top ten) so hopefully resolved in not too long.
Seems to be fixed now.
I like the concept of the post, but found it difficult to read. Too much data, and not enough conclusions.
The conclusions are in the headlines and further details can be found in the paragraphs below. I think it was easy to skim through and get a good picture of their takeaways.
This is a cool analysis, although I think every t-shirt I own is from Target (Merona and Mossimo brands) so I didn't have a single point of reference for the width and length charts. Those charts seemed like by far the most useful part of this post.

Edit: I'm curious about the downvotes. Are people appalled at my lack of taste in t-shirts? :)

It confirms that American Apparel small fits me well, but I need XS from other brands. I guess Zara small would be OK too.
Man, so many things that I always wanted to know. Why didn't a marketing team at Tide make a infographic about this a decade ago?
Because they spend all their money on TV commercials and magazine ads!
It's pretty well known that tees made using 1920s-era loopwheeling machines don't suffer from size changes, and age really well. But sadly these are now super expensive, and only offered by Japanese niche brands who bought machinery from American corps.
I remember visiting a Japanese clothes shop here in Dubai and I noticed their shirts were quite different in texture than anything else I'd seen. It was expensive too. I think it's called Superdry? Could that be one of the niche brands you're talking about or are they just using a unique blend of textiles?

In any case, it's quite fascinating how sometimes old tech is simply better than what we have today.

Superdry is a British brand which produces rather nice shirts with Japanese print on them :)
Damn, it felt Japanese though :(
It's quite funny actually: "The Japanese text incorporated in the brand's logo—極度乾燥(しなさい) (kyokudo kansō (shinasai)?)—literally translates as "Maximum dry (please do)", the text in brackets being due to the translation software used offering alternatives depending on whether dry is intended as a noun (e.g., super dryness) or an imperative, (e.g., dry this shirt out)." [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperGroup

Hah, Superdry is overpriced rubbish bought by 45-year-olds who can afford it because they think that's what 25-year-olds wear.
or Supreme is Superdry for 25 year olds.
Most 45 year olds would not give a flying duck to what 25 year olds year.
Oh I assure you, mid life crises are a thing.
Sure they are, but don't they opt for the "nice car", "younger girlfriend", etc?

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.

A Superdry jacket is the new combover.
I have lived in SE Asia for half a decade and am currently in Taipei and honestly I see a lot of 15-30 year old Asians wearing Superdry. They invariably think it is actually Japanese. I haven't noticed older guys wearing it here but perhaps I haven't been looking.
Superdry clothes have a reasonable price/quality ratio. I'd rate the clothes higher quality than any other Jack&Jones/Tom Tailor/H&M etc brands I own though.
I fins the fits really strange, especially for men. Everything there is a tall fit. And the quality is rubbish, I had 2 of the zippers on my winter coat to break after a couple months use. I expected more for a decently priced coat.
That piqued my interest. Do you know the name of any of the Japanese niche brands?
The magazine Free & Easy is all about these brands
The Real McCoys, The Strike Gold, Studio D'Artisan.

Here's a good introduction on loopwheeled shirts from Japanese repro brands.

http://www.heddels.com/2014/03/an-introduction-to-loopwheele...

Only some of The Real McCoys are loopwheeled sadly, and there's some confusion over which.

The Flat Head and Tezomeya are also other examples of loopwheeled tees.

Then... how can you really tell what The Real "The Real McCoys" really are?
RMC website is accurate. But some distributors like superdenim mislabel things a lot.
Are these western names used in western countries for Japanese products or so the names also get used in Japan?
The names are used in Japan. Some of these names (e.g., "Strike Gold") conjure up an old-school Americana. This is intentional. Japanese denim brands (who now make these shirts as well) are very reverent of pre-1960s Levis.
They use the English names in Japan. If you google for the Japanese official websites for these brands or even their products on rakuten.co.jp you'll see the brand names in English.
$100 for a t-shirt?

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.

Loopwheelers apply even (low) tension on yarn which prevents uneven warping, but that doesn't change the fact that cotton still shrinks as a fiber.
But it helps, a lot.
>It's pretty well known that tees made using 1920s-era loopwheeling machines don't suffer from size changes, and age really well

Well don't I feel stupid, I didn't know this pretty well known thing. Thanks for the share. :)

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I have been thinking the same for a long time. Clothing these days are just branding, marketing as such. I don't want any of that. I want quality, decent materials.

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.

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Which niche brands use loopwheeling? Going to Japan soon; maybe will pick up a few tees.

A search for ループウィール turns up some hits, like the Barns brand.

strike gold would be a good brand to start with. they're available in the US but you definitely pay a premium
These sizing charts are incredible and must have taken a lot of effort to put together. I'm gonna come back to this page a lot.
The results are too important to accept without peer review, examine the methodology, etc.
As a bit of an aside, I actually came across this from a tweet by Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame.
I've standardized my shirts on the Uniqlo Crew Shirts and they seem to have very little change from wash to wash compared to my Banana Shirts.

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.

Poly blends are not going to noticeably get smaller wash to wash. They will get worse-looking though, as they don't shrink consistency - only the cotton shrinks, not the polyester.
Probably one of the few times I've enjoyed an ad, useful and interesting! good job threadbase
Great to have this data. But wouldn't the extent of dryer-induced shrinkage be driven by the amount of time in the dryer, as much or more than temperature?

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?)

From the post:

"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)."

That doesn't answer the question, which is an interesting one. Where in the dry cycle does shrinkage occur? If you dry on hot to slightly damp, do you get the same level of shrinkage as cool to fully dry? If so, why haven't I ever seen a dryer that starts hot and transitions to cool as the clothes dry out?
If so, why haven't I ever seen a dryer that starts hot and transitions to cool as the clothes dry out?

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.

But they call it "permanent press" so those of us who didn't study domestic science don't know what it does ;)

Thanks for explaining something I was always curious about in the laundry room but forgot about by the time I reached a computer.

But they call it "permanent press" so those of us who didn't study domestic science don't know what it does ;)

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.

side note to the web team: please add RSS to your blog.
We should mandate all Blog to have RSS.
I learned the dryer effect hard way - so many good tees were destroyed. :( Nowadays I just leave my t-shirts and polos to dry.

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!

tldr Pro-tip: If you want to get long life out of clothes you like, don't put them in the dryer.
Does someone know what tools were used to make the graphs in this article?
I'm guessing highcharts.com, since I had to enable scripts from there to get them to show.
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This is a great resource, thank you. Being tall with a long torso, trial and error buying t-shirts has been torturous and expensive.
Ditto.

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.

There's a Dutch brand that specializes in extra long t-shirts: http://www.girav.com/ - they have Standard Long for men 1.75m (5.8 ft) to 1.85m (6 ft), Long Fit 1.85m (6 ft) / 1.90m (6.2 ft) or taller, and Extra Long Fit 2.00m (6.6 ft) and over.
I have a few of those, they are expensive but nice, I pick them first from the stack, LIFO.
Thx, I hope they do Worldwide shipping
Have you tried shirts from skateboarding/extreme sports brands? They tend to be longer but relatively not much wider.
A "2xtall" for every size would be nice. I wear a small and most shirts run a bit short for my liking.
The other problem is that athletic-fit t-shirts are hard to find these days.
I'm a huge fan of Eddie Bauer's medium-tall shirts. They usually don't sell them in store, but you can get one online if you are looking for an option to try out.

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.

This is how military utility uniforms are sized: Small, Medium, Large and Short, Regular, Tall. I'm surprised that idea hasn't spread into mainstream sizing.
Being tall with a long torso, trial and error buying t-shirts has been torturous and expensive

Try RibbedTee.com. Esp. the Micro Modal shirts. Yes, they are expensive. But they last and fit.

Very cool but please add a metric measurements option to your search.
>What surprised us was that over the course of many wash cycles, the chest and waist will drift wider and the length will drift shorter.

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?

I'm not sure that it would.. the next sentence says that the shirt expands when worn and 2x more in the chest than the length.. that says to me that its not the weave, its just being stretched more in the chest direction so the length never recovers from its shrinking which becomes cumulative.
I think this is because the shirt is stretched horizontally just from being worn but obviously there's no forces stretching the shirt vertically because any force that would stretch it vertically just raises the bottom instead
The fabric can't always be rotated 90 degrees. Some T-shirts body portion is made from tubes of fabric. The ones with seams on the sides have the possiblity, but that highly depends on the weave of the t-shirt material itself. The material is knit in a way that is stretchy, and turning the pattern pieces (the only logical way to turn the fabric 90 degrees) can make the shirt not stretch the right directions when worn and/or force changes in the garment itself.
I don't have a dryer, but I've still had cotton shirts (not t-shirts) shrink in the washing machine. This usually happens the first time (or first few times) they are washed at the temperature recommended on the label: 40°C (104°F). However, at 30°C (86°F) I've never encountered any shrinkage. So this purely anecdotal experience makes me believe that the temperature of water can affect some cotton garments.
I've stopped buying 100% cotton t-shirts because they shrink so much. polyester/cotton or tri-blend last so much longer. Also, I find them more comfortable to use (cotton sticks to the skin when it gets humid).
You're washing them too hot, or you're drying them too hot.
Is there a "grain" to the fabric or something? Why not turn it 90deg and have the shirts increase in length and decrease in the chest instead? I'd prefer size to stay the same over time, but if I had to choose I think I'd rather have that.
Because the shirt would not stretch to your chest, making it hard to get on/off. Also it would look like a flaccid tube hanging off your body.
So is there no economic pressure to develop a fabric weave that's both efficient to manufacture and stable over time?
The knit pattern (tees are not woven) only affects the ratio of stretch per direction. Shrinkage is much more a property of the fiber and fabric processing, like prewashing.
I would love to see the size dataset expand to casual and dress buttonups, and even jeans. A bit of data like this will greatly improve my shopping experience.