I'm down to just a few sweat shirts and over shirts from the 80s, but they are hanging in there. Both the colors and the fabric. When the subject comes up with friends who ask about a particular shirt I joke, "The cotton was tougher back then". Recently, I've had jeans, shirts, and even socks that didn't make it through a single summer.
Is anyone else freaked out about cleaning their dryer's lint filter given all the new fabric materials? I'm putting together a dryer-vac system to keep it from billowing into the air of our small laundry room.
There's still good fabrics out there you just have to pay for them. I've mostly replaced my wardrobe now with natural undyed cottons and wools from the likes of "unbleached apparel" and "industry of all nations". There is cotton grown in new mexico, socks spun in north carolina. "Filson" makes a few things in Seattle. Don't skip the stuff made in Peru or India neither.
- American Giant is pretty good for their pullover hoodies. They'll wear out at the cuffs first, but I've kept a single hoody in use for like five years with some repair stitching.
- Standard Issue makes good waffle knit shirts. They'll last a few years depending on how often you wash them.
- Duluth Trading makes some good cotton shirts and boxers. Quality has declined slightly, but they're the best plain cotton shirts and boxers I've found so far.
- Big John makes denim jeans on old Levi looms. They even use cotton stitching.
- Carhartt makes some okay dressy dungarees. Their work pants are worthless these days though (in my experience). They've been pivoting to lifestyle for a few years now.
- Filson in my opinion has declined, but they're still pretty good. The socks are great, but they're overpriced.
(Only posting this because I've struggled finding decent clothes myself and it's hard to tell what's good when you're shopping online)
Rather than focus on brand, I'd recommend developing a better eye and learning how to identify durable, high quality fabrics.
While looking at the brand might be a good heuristic to rely on in the short term, the temptation is too high for vendors to take advantage of their brand power to offload cheaper fabrics for higher margins, I'm looking at you H&M and UNIQLO ...
my own recommendation is spend some money, and look at tags.
I shop at JCrew and higher end fashion companies, but still check material and care labels.
I once bought 100% hemp pants because I heard that material is tougher than cotton, but my bicycle seat killed the pants in just a few weeks. Modern jeans last a few months to a year. I have yet to find pants that endure a bicycle commute.
I don't have any clothes as old as yours though for sure, but line drying generally helps your clothes last longer. I'm so glad I live in Colorado. It's a warm winter, but it takes like 3 hours to dry stuff on the line (especially synthetics). Of course that means all my synthetic fibers are literally billowing into the air I guess. Still, we've been going without a dryer for about five years now and I've had no regrets.
My strategy forever is to wash all my shirts, put them in the dryer on low for 5 minutes, then hang them all up in a doorway overnight. My clothes last much longer this way and never get wrinkled.
I had a european friend introduce me to indoor drying racks, and since, anything I plan to keep long term, I hang dry as well. I've found my clothes last longer and look nicer. Only thing I've found doesn't work well are towels.
I got a Foxydry (Italy) wall-mounted rack a few years back, best €100 I spent that year.
Bottom rack folds up flush to the wall, top rack raises nearly to the ceiling. Towels dry fine spread over extra bar or three to allow for better air circulation.
I use my line in Texas, and 3 hours would see the clothes go from wet -> dry -> melted! And that's in the shade!
Unfortunately, the line dried clothes are not soft, so I end up fluffing them in the drier using the air dry setting. Still cheaper than running the heating element, but hasn't eliminated the drier for me.
Yeah, I've started being a bit concerned about inhaling all the tiny plastic fibers every time I clean the filters and wondering what could be doing to my lunges.
It has been ages since I had clothes shrink on me. To the point that I had assumed something must have gotten better in modern dryers. Is that not the case?
Edit: Quickly searching, this appears to be the case? Specifically modern moisture sensing dryers that stop appropriately goes a long way to never having something shrink on you.
I have a moisture-sensing dryer from the 80's that lets me select between multiple dryness levels, and it is extremely repeatable, as opposed to my parent's modern moisture-sensing dryer that that adds a fixed amount of drying time after the sensor trips, in hopes that the clothes will be dry enough. Sometimes they are and sometimes they aren't.
I wish I lived in your world. It is very rare I find a long-sleeved garment whose sleeves are long enough, and it usually only takes a wash or two for them to become too short :(
They are fully synthetic, so may not suit you, and the brand is fishing/outdoors oriented, but Southern Marsh makes very comfortable T shirts that feature 30 UPF in their “performance shirt” lines. Have seen no shrinkage and the arms are long.
As a pale guy whose wife likes the beach, they have been very helpful.
This makes sense in the modern age where retailers accept returns for any/no reason and manufacturers tend to bend over backwards to get you to avoid returning anything.
Same reason why any furniture you order online seems to always have all the tools necessary to assemble it. They never require power tools and always include screwdriver(s) and/or Allen wrenches. They need to design away every possible reason someone might just return it.
Not buying fast fashion helps with the color fastness. There was the article sometime back about one of the popular depeche mode sites with "swimming attire" vs swimsuits as they were not meant to get wet and the colors would run down your skin if you got them wet.
I should have been clear, I also expected that there were changes to the clothes. I was just more surprised after we ran some sweaters through the cycle on accident, only to find that they did just fine.
I still find it to be the case that most 100% cotton shirts shrink over time (even pre-shrunk) and have switched to blends just to get some more longevity out of them.
If you have 100% cotton garments you want to get more longevity out of, washing on cold water + letting them air dry is the way to go (although sticking stuff in the dryer for ~5 minutes on the lowest possible setting before putting it on a hanger is fine to help fluff out any wrinkles). This also goes for anything "nice" that you want to keep in the best possible shape, even if it's not 100% cotton--don't forget that dryer lint is partly the result of your clothes' fabric sloughing off, which is why some shirts get paper-thin if you own them long enough!
I wear a lot of 100% cotton (including 100% linen) shirts that still look and fit almost like new, since I'm a stickler about laundering them this way. Towels, on the other hand, get maximum heat for both washing and drying, and you can really see the difference. I use a lot of 100% cotton washcloths from those Target multipacks, and recently bought a set identical to one I'd bought a year or two prior; the new one was larger, a little softer, and a much brighter color. The old one had shrunk to a pale, slightly scratchy ghost of its former self!
On exactly one occasion, I accidentally threw a 100% cotton shirt in the towel hamper and didn't catch it before starting the load. It's not a shirt so much as a crop top now :)
I've had the opposite problem where I hadn't had shrinking issues in years until I got a new LG dryer with one of those auto sensing modes that it defaults to. The "smart" feature is terrible. I had a number of shirts shrink on me because it sometimes goes absurdly overboard with the drying.
Once we figured out the problem and stopped using all of the smart features it started working fine. Unfortunately the interface really wants you to use the fancy modes and requires an annoying amount of steps to manually set a drying run. Easily the worst dryer UX I've ever had. I doubt I'll buy another LG appliance, although there are probably plenty of other offenders these days.
I have a kitchenaid dryer from the 80's with multiple selections for dryness levels and it works great every time. I can leave the clothes a little moist if the air is dry and I'm going to hang them immediately or set them to completely dry, in case I'm going to be away when they are ready.
My parents' modern dryer is awful, just like yours. The craziest part is that it starts a countdown timer when there's tens of minutes left, as though the designers new the sensor was awful and decided to add some extra drying time to cover it up.
I think ours is an LG. Could be something faulty with the sensor in yours, if it is still newish, worth a support call to them to see if they can fix it.
I say it's the dryer too, more than the washer for a lot of fabrics.
You just have to figure with all that dryer lint after every single load that your items certainly aren't getting any bigger after giving off all those grams of fiber.
You can only imagine whether or not more or less fiber than that is being lost down the drain with your wash water each time.
Modern heat pump dryers also work at a lower temperature because they cool the air to evaporate the moisture so they don't need to be as hot to start with.
I think a lot of things use pre-shrunk fabric these days. I've got t-shirts that haven't shrunk, and t-shirts that have. Unfortunately a lot of band shirts bought at concerts fall into the latter :(.
I was just offering the amusing anecdote that I have a 30 year old shirt that doesn't shrink. I used to treat it with kids gloves to keep it from doing so.
Note that I fully understand it for the anecdotal weight that it has. That is, basically none. Is fun for conversation, but isn't intended to prove anything.
It's not just moisture sensing. Modern dryers also use patterns to prevent shrinking in terms of reducing the heat and then bringing it back as opposed to a constant temperature until dry.
Unless the load is very small this doesn't really do much - water evaporates and uses however much heat the dryer can put out. It is only near the end of the cycle where this can make a difference in most cases.
I've had the opposite problem with several of my t-shirts stretching/expanding going from M to something equivalent to XL size and I fail to understand why.
New clothes also tend to include synthetic fibers that seem to not shrink as much. 100% cotton, or especially wool garments will shrink if you’re not careful, but are becoming increasingly difficult to find.
I had thought this was the main driver, but we washed some of our nicer clothes and they came out just fine. I have a cashmere sweater we accidentally sent through the cycle that didn't shrink.
I've killed a bunch of stuff lately mixing some wool socks in with towels. Oops. The towels stay wet long enough that the wool got overheated, and then my 8 year old spent the next week yelling at me for ruining his socks. :)
There was a great custom order screen printing website blog where they documented their shrinkage testing. They made a pressure sensitive shirt form and then ran 30+ brands of shirts through a battery of tests, measuring fit after each washing.
I've heard reports that the newer heat pump clothes dryers are less prone to cause shrinking. In their default mode they act more like a dehumidifier than a heater. In theory you can wash more delicate dry-clean only garments as well.
Do you like it? I've toyed with the idea of getting one for energy efficiency, but my current washer and dryer (electric) are still chugging along and it feels wasteful
As I understand it, many people prefer the heat pump dryers because they are easier to install. Most are 110v and don't exhaust moisture, so you can just shove one in a closet if it has sufficient electricity. You do need to remove the water reservoir and pour it down a drain after every few loads of laundry.
Oh, that part of the installation is easy, it's literally just physically getting a large, heavy rectangular cuboid navigated through my basement to the laundry room. The last time I brought one in I put a hole in the door (by accident).
I find clothes labels are way too conservative. Half of my stuff says don't dry, hand wash only, or cold wash on delicate.
Unless it's a particularly expensive or dry clean only, I just wash at 40 degrees "daily" programme, except for underwear, towels and bedding which go in at 60.
Most stuff is fine. On the rare occasion something gets ruined, I don't get that brand again.
They are too conservative but it really depends. Lots of formal pants are a mix of wool, rayon and cotton. They'll indicate to only steam clean, and whilst they can be washed on 30c + delicate, you have to make sure to wash inside out and to dry them hanging from the legs. Mostly due to the rayon, although the wool is also a sensitive fabric.
In general it's just smart to wash and (air)dry things inside out. Keep the wear and tear on the inside.
And if you have decent suit jackets, pants or dress shirts, please just steam or hand clean them.
I take the opposite approach: wash everything on the default setting and whatever survives (almost everything) is now confirmed safe for that setting. Keeps things simpler and has the advantage that you can cut of those scratchy labels that are always attached in the most uncomfortable places possible.
I have a similar one, but all it says is wash anything and everything except sheets and towels on cold/permapress/delicate with half the recommended amount of detergent, and use your head when deciding what to put in the dryer on a setting that leaves just a little moisture. Sheets and towels get the hot water treatment with a full drying cycle.
That seems to be a nonsensical generalization. A lot of symbols have the negative condition applied with an X. So if you applied it to "generic dry" it would mean do not dry. But it's reasonable when applied to a subset. For instance, do not tumble dry
You would think that, but there is an icon for not using a dryer. There is an icon for all forms of drying. On a clothes line, in the shade, "flat", ...
Growing up I was always told that cotton would shrink in the dryer but polyester wouldn't, and I should just check the tag on a shirt to find out if it would shrink (which usually would say something like 100% cotton, 100% polyester, 50% cotton/50% polyester, etc.). Seeing the title on this article made me think that it would be a refutation of that conventional wisdom, but it sounds like what I was taught growing up was basically correct.
I can't help but be curious now; is this something that other people my age (born in the early 90s) had heard when they were kids? Did people who grew up earlier than that hear it when they were kids, or did this idea maybe not reach mainstream status until a bit later (maybe my parents were relatively early in repeating this wisdom)? Or maybe it's something that used to be common knowledge that's been "lost" to newer generations for some reason? I'm genuinely a bit surprised to see that this article was published just last summer, since I assumed that the basic premise would be have something the average person would have learned before then from existing sources. Maybe I'm assuming too much about whether this article was intended to be about the "what" rather than the "why", but the language seems intended to be approachable to those from a non-scientific background (e.g. "on a chemical level, there are also links between the chains called hydrogen bonds"; I would expect someone talking to another scientist to be more direct and say something like "there are hydrogen bonds" with the expectation that they understood what they were already).
Uniqlo and Patagonia specifically test their products through wear and tear and wash//dry cycles sources (others, too) - https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/22/inside-uniqlos... and Let My People Surf. I think most other stuff we commonly see at retail has degraded to fast fashion and meant to only last a short time.
You need to be constantly updating your knowledge in this area. Laundry detergents and garment materials have evolved a lot in the last few decades. A lot of conventional wisdom is outdated.
You don't need to wash Hot. Detergents work in cold water now.
Cotton is often pre-shrunk but YMMV.
Personally I do not use any of these chemical additives for clothes. The best wash is unscented detergent with vinegar in the pre-wash (where liquid fabric softner goes). Vinegar does the job of deodorizing, getting rid of static, and fabric softening. You don't need a dryer sheet. I'll use spray and wash still for stains. Dish detergent for oil stains.
I stopped wearing plastic so I'm not sure what modern polyester shirts are like.
Washing cold and drying low means you'll rarely shrink something. My favorite shirts I'll hang dry.
Cotton shrinks, and that your dryer is too hot or running too long. Born in the late 80s, I think this was even a joke on sitcoms at one point (I have this vague memory of a husband pulling his favorite shirt out of the dryer and wearing it while it was still damp just so it wouldn't shrink), so it seems more like previously-common knowledge that was lost.
I am tall enough that shrinking t-shirts is a constant annoyance! (though I have to admit I haven't ever tried the 'conditioner and water' trick, even though I've heard of it before).
Low temperature washes and avoiding tumble dryers works. I've also noticed thicker material t-shirts seem to definitely shrink a lot less! Much thinner cottton t-shirts seem to shrink a lot more, my mental model is that there's less material so when it bunches together to it's "happy place", it ends up a lot smaller. I have no evidence for this though.
Any other tips from people here? Also, has anyone actually tried stretching with hair conditioner?
Higher rise pants help. I have a long torso and started buying higher rise pants for the aesthetic difference, but they also make me less concerned about a t shirt becoming a belly shirt
Hang-dry your tees. It's a slight annoyance vs just bombing everything into the dryer, but it's very worth it to not have sleeves that are too short. I usually hang mine on the shower's curtain rod to dry.
And frankly, this seems like less effort than trying to apply some hack to unshrink them after the damage is done.
Her logic seems reasonable but stating that the fibers "return to their original crinkled state" is missing the fact that the fiber go through the process of spinning to improve tensile strength (as well as the options of making an infinite yarn from finite fibers by twisting them together). regardless to return to original "crinckled state" they need to overcome those forces as well as the forces of the geometry of the knit(on a different scale).
BTW Rayon is also made from cellulose, cellulose II. While Cellulose I(natural) is metastable it can be converted by disolving in lye to a stable form (beta-gllocouse molecolue chain goes from being parallel to being anti parllel which increases the # of hydrogen bonds as well as helping create a more stable 3d structure) which again improve tensile strength and resist wrinkles on a different scale.
My eye hit the "It’s not just hot water – here’s why" as one of the first things... em-dash, here's why... I smell the smelly smell, even though I'm not even opposed to it haha.
Denim and duck cotton tend to "break in" after a few wearings. This happens with a lot of cotton work clothes and also with a good pair of technical or work boots. They tend to mold themselves to your body shape. It doesn't happen at all with nylon work pants like the ones Carhartt makes.
If somebody wants to wear tight jeans, how can they do that, if the jeans that were tight in store expand afterwards? Surely you can't buy a size smaller because then you can't wear them to break them.
Bought some dress shirts (made of mostly cotton) from Banana Republic, the same brand that had good shirts some years back, the exact same size I wear.
Shockingly, after hand washing them for the first time in cold water, the sleeves have shrunk so dramatically that I cannot wear them any longer, except to roll up the sleeves Up to beyond the elbow.
They just lost customer for life. Enshittification strikes again.
I have had some low temperature wool disasters. The spin cycle I think is to blame. But you want it dry, you think you'll get away with it, then you sigh deeply upon finding the shrinky dinky.
tl;dr; you can't, cause the fibers are crinckled up in a lower energy state, but try soaking in 1 tablespoon of hair conditioner per liter of lukewarm water and stretch.
I hardly have anything that I'd trust to a mechanical washer or dryer, these days. The things I do (mostly underwear and socks) still need cold-wash and extra-low-heat dry.
Is anyone else freaked out about cleaning their dryer's lint filter given all the new fabric materials? I'm putting together a dryer-vac system to keep it from billowing into the air of our small laundry room.
- American Giant is pretty good for their pullover hoodies. They'll wear out at the cuffs first, but I've kept a single hoody in use for like five years with some repair stitching.
- Standard Issue makes good waffle knit shirts. They'll last a few years depending on how often you wash them.
- Duluth Trading makes some good cotton shirts and boxers. Quality has declined slightly, but they're the best plain cotton shirts and boxers I've found so far.
- Big John makes denim jeans on old Levi looms. They even use cotton stitching.
- Carhartt makes some okay dressy dungarees. Their work pants are worthless these days though (in my experience). They've been pivoting to lifestyle for a few years now.
- Filson in my opinion has declined, but they're still pretty good. The socks are great, but they're overpriced.
(Only posting this because I've struggled finding decent clothes myself and it's hard to tell what's good when you're shopping online)
While looking at the brand might be a good heuristic to rely on in the short term, the temptation is too high for vendors to take advantage of their brand power to offload cheaper fabrics for higher margins, I'm looking at you H&M and UNIQLO ...
my own recommendation is spend some money, and look at tags. I shop at JCrew and higher end fashion companies, but still check material and care labels.
I spend much more upfront for clothes, but I gain a lot long term. Clothes don't look terrible after few washings and they tend to last forever.
or have any cracks for air to enter the door or doorjam,
that 90% relative humidity should be no problem!
Unfortunately, the line dried clothes are not soft, so I end up fluffing them in the drier using the air dry setting. Still cheaper than running the heating element, but hasn't eliminated the drier for me.
Edit: Quickly searching, this appears to be the case? Specifically modern moisture sensing dryers that stop appropriately goes a long way to never having something shrink on you.
As a pale guy whose wife likes the beach, they have been very helpful.
Similar improvements have been made to improve colorfastness. Mixing new reds and whites used to consistently produce pink. Not anymore.
Same reason why any furniture you order online seems to always have all the tools necessary to assemble it. They never require power tools and always include screwdriver(s) and/or Allen wrenches. They need to design away every possible reason someone might just return it.
I have some semi-recent pinkified cloths.
That said, washing everything on cold water and low temps in the dryer works pretty well at extending the life of cloths.
I wear a lot of 100% cotton (including 100% linen) shirts that still look and fit almost like new, since I'm a stickler about laundering them this way. Towels, on the other hand, get maximum heat for both washing and drying, and you can really see the difference. I use a lot of 100% cotton washcloths from those Target multipacks, and recently bought a set identical to one I'd bought a year or two prior; the new one was larger, a little softer, and a much brighter color. The old one had shrunk to a pale, slightly scratchy ghost of its former self!
On exactly one occasion, I accidentally threw a 100% cotton shirt in the towel hamper and didn't catch it before starting the load. It's not a shirt so much as a crop top now :)
Once we figured out the problem and stopped using all of the smart features it started working fine. Unfortunately the interface really wants you to use the fancy modes and requires an annoying amount of steps to manually set a drying run. Easily the worst dryer UX I've ever had. I doubt I'll buy another LG appliance, although there are probably plenty of other offenders these days.
My parents' modern dryer is awful, just like yours. The craziest part is that it starts a countdown timer when there's tens of minutes left, as though the designers new the sensor was awful and decided to add some extra drying time to cover it up.
You just have to figure with all that dryer lint after every single load that your items certainly aren't getting any bigger after giving off all those grams of fiber.
You can only imagine whether or not more or less fiber than that is being lost down the drain with your wash water each time.
Note that I fully understand it for the anecdotal weight that it has. That is, basically none. Is fun for conversation, but isn't intended to prove anything.
At this point I thought you were going for an ahem heavy-handed joke.
Might have been our new hangers.
On that last, I almost forgot I had direct evidence. We visited a place that shrank some of our clothes that we had washed many times back home.
dryer settings,
local environment in the laundry room.
Probably in that order.
I am not using a dryer, only a washing machine.
Can UV do that?
Those sensors, across brands, are absolute garbage.
I've heard reports that the newer heat pump clothes dryers are less prone to cause shrinking. In their default mode they act more like a dehumidifier than a heater. In theory you can wash more delicate dry-clean only garments as well.
It's very gentle on clothes, but it does take a bit longer to dry.
(I've been tempted to just yolo buy one to try it out but installing it in my house is a pain in the rear because of the location.)
https://www.ihateironing.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/07...
Unless it's a particularly expensive or dry clean only, I just wash at 40 degrees "daily" programme, except for underwear, towels and bedding which go in at 60.
Most stuff is fine. On the rare occasion something gets ruined, I don't get that brand again.
In general it's just smart to wash and (air)dry things inside out. Keep the wear and tear on the inside.
And if you have decent suit jackets, pants or dress shirts, please just steam or hand clean them.
We have a lot of "shrinkage" in our house, that I am convinced is more due to both of us uhh "growing" rather than the clothes shrinking ;)
You can imagine, it's a delicate subject
I can't help but be curious now; is this something that other people my age (born in the early 90s) had heard when they were kids? Did people who grew up earlier than that hear it when they were kids, or did this idea maybe not reach mainstream status until a bit later (maybe my parents were relatively early in repeating this wisdom)? Or maybe it's something that used to be common knowledge that's been "lost" to newer generations for some reason? I'm genuinely a bit surprised to see that this article was published just last summer, since I assumed that the basic premise would be have something the average person would have learned before then from existing sources. Maybe I'm assuming too much about whether this article was intended to be about the "what" rather than the "why", but the language seems intended to be approachable to those from a non-scientific background (e.g. "on a chemical level, there are also links between the chains called hydrogen bonds"; I would expect someone talking to another scientist to be more direct and say something like "there are hydrogen bonds" with the expectation that they understood what they were already).
You don't need to wash Hot. Detergents work in cold water now.
Cotton is often pre-shrunk but YMMV.
Personally I do not use any of these chemical additives for clothes. The best wash is unscented detergent with vinegar in the pre-wash (where liquid fabric softner goes). Vinegar does the job of deodorizing, getting rid of static, and fabric softening. You don't need a dryer sheet. I'll use spray and wash still for stains. Dish detergent for oil stains.
I stopped wearing plastic so I'm not sure what modern polyester shirts are like.
Washing cold and drying low means you'll rarely shrink something. My favorite shirts I'll hang dry.
Low temperature washes and avoiding tumble dryers works. I've also noticed thicker material t-shirts seem to definitely shrink a lot less! Much thinner cottton t-shirts seem to shrink a lot more, my mental model is that there's less material so when it bunches together to it's "happy place", it ends up a lot smaller. I have no evidence for this though.
Any other tips from people here? Also, has anyone actually tried stretching with hair conditioner?
And frankly, this seems like less effort than trying to apply some hack to unshrink them after the damage is done.
BTW Rayon is also made from cellulose, cellulose II. While Cellulose I(natural) is metastable it can be converted by disolving in lye to a stable form (beta-gllocouse molecolue chain goes from being parallel to being anti parllel which increases the # of hydrogen bonds as well as helping create a more stable 3d structure) which again improve tensile strength and resist wrinkles on a different scale.
Shockingly, after hand washing them for the first time in cold water, the sleeves have shrunk so dramatically that I cannot wear them any longer, except to roll up the sleeves Up to beyond the elbow.
They just lost customer for life. Enshittification strikes again.