Men's Cotton T-Shirt

Details

A plain crew-neck T-shirt knitted from combed cotton on a circular machine in Tiruppur, at a measured 190 GSM. This is the mill-made everyday line and it says so. There is no handloom T-shirt on this shelf and there never will be, because jersey is knitted on a machine and not woven on a loom, so the handloom question does not arise here at all. What a T-shirt is judged on instead is fibre, weight, shrinkage and the neck, and the market cheats on all four. Polyester goes in and the label still reads 100 percent cotton, because once knitted and dyed the two are indistinguishable to the hand. The weight is under-declared, so a 150 GSM tee is sold as 180 and you find out the first time you stand in front of a window. The tee is not compacted before cutting, so it comes back from the first wash a size shorter, which is the commonest complaint about a cotton T-shirt and is entirely avoidable. And the collar rib is knitted without elastane to keep the composition line simple, which is why so many T-shirts have a wavy neck by the second month.

• Body is 100 percent combed cotton, confirmed by FTIR, no polyester and no viscose
• The collar rib is 95 percent cotton and 5 percent elastane, and we print that rather than rounding the garment to 100 percent, because a rib with no elastane will not recover and we would rather declare the five percent than sell you a neck that goes wavy
• 190 GSM, measured on a cut disc from the finished roll, not quoted from the yarn
• Combed rather than carded, so the short fibres are out and it does not pill in the second month
• Compacted and pre-shrunk, under 3 percent residual shrinkage after three washes at 40 C, ISO 6330
• Shoulder-to-shoulder tape across the back neck seam, so the neckline holds its shape
• Double-needle hem at the body and the sleeve, not a single row of chainstitch that runs when it breaks
• Bio-washed, an enzyme rinse that takes the surface fuzz off, so it starts smooth and stays smooth
• Reactive-dyed and azo-free, below the 30 ppm limit for restricted aromatic amines
• At 190 GSM this is a substantial tee rather than a summer-thin one. A 150 GSM tee is cooler in May and it is also see-through, so we do not stock it
• Solid colours only, and a dark solid will lose a shade over the first year, because reactive dye fades honestly instead of being held there by a fixative that comes off on your skin