Why some clothes shrink in the wash and how to unshrink them
swinburne.edu.au504 points by OptionOfT 4 days ago
504 points by OptionOfT 4 days ago
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.
I can confirm that you really don't want to breathe in any of that crap.
A year and a half ago I developed symptoms of what was some form of bronchitis. Lots of mucus, constantly coughing, etc. I was pretty freaking sick. I tend to wait some things like this out, but it wasn't going away so I went to a doctor and got some medications including albuterol and some kind of steroid (prednisone, I think). It got a little more manageable, but didn't seem to be getting any better.
One day, I realized how much of a dumbass I was the whole time.
The apartment I was living in had a laundry room, but it was tiny and I got tired of both hauling laundry up and down multiple flights of stairs and having to fight for time with the few machines that were there. I bought a small washer and dryer pair from Black & Decker which were designed for apartment living. Kinda off topic, but there were no hookups in my unit, so I had to jerryrig a water connection using some collapsible garden hoses that connected to my shower and its drain. Was kinda hilarious but worked great.
I made the mistake of thinking that I could just allow the dryer to blow through two sets of lint traps and have a fan blow air out of the window to manage moisture and remaining lint making it through. What I didn't realize was how inadequate the traps were. Because I worked from home, I spent a lot of time in that bedroom, including when the dryer was running. I was breathing in all sorts of stuff without knowing it.
Once I stopped hanging out in that room while the dryer was running, bought an air purifier, and made sure to frequently clean my apartment of dust, my symptoms rapidly started to go away.
If I had to do all of that again, and I couldn't just have the dryer blow directly out the window, I would find some way to have it do a second pass through a HEPA filter, perhaps after drying the air with something like calcium chloride.
I shudder to think of all the microplastic fibers that remain somewhere in my body.
We have a washing machine that also has a drier function. It dries much slower than a standalone drier as it consumes water during the drying circle to cool and condense the hot air from the clothes. But the big plus is that it works in mostly closed cycle reusing the air. And there is no need to clean the filter, just unclog the sink pipes once in few months.
Also definitely look into ventless dryers - while not as quick as a vented one, the heat pump versions have come a long way from the classic condenser styles of the past.
Our ventless dryer is great. Maybe it takes 50% longer, but we're not running multiple loads a day so who cares? Smaller to medium sized electric ventless dryers are the most efficient dryers out there. (Of course we also just use clothes racks to dry stuff.)
Inhaling large quantities of any type of fiber is not good, cotton included: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byssinosis
But if anything I'd think plastic fibers are less likely to have any effects, because they're inert.
Being chemically inert isn’t enough for your lungs, the mechanical properties are also critical.
Microplastics aren’t necessarily chemically inert either, but it’s worth remembering just how delicate your lungs are.
I got a drying closet. It's basically a heater in a tent with a few vents. It takes almost twice as long as a similarly sized tumble-drying machine, but absolutely nothing but warm, moist air is exhausted into the room. I even use it to supplement a space heater.
I'd be interested to know why buying, installing, jerryrigging, and (presumably every time you did a load of laundry) hooking and unhooking collapsible hosing for a washer and dryer in a bedroom you worked from, was in any way more convenient or cheaper or useful than just using the communal laundry room or a dedicated laundry service?
Don't forget "almost dying from toxic air pollution" too
I was in a similar situation and my solution was to just buy enough clothes and not get them dirty when wearing so that it would last me about 2 months between having to do laundry. But I didn't have communal laundry, I had to drive across town to a public laundry.
Your symptoms are pretty similar to what I experienced after using a dry powder fire extinguisher in a confined space a few years ago.
If you were never a smoker, hopefully your mucociliary escalator can deal with all the lint you inhaled!
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.
Do you have any brand recommendations?
$.02:
- 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)
Darn tough for socks and Brunt for hoodies, I would add to this list. I'm hard on clothes and they survive me.
I am stunned by DT's longevity. I'm finally starting to wear thin the back of the ankle/heel from shoe friction in one set, after about 6 years, with a total of about 8pr socks in rotation. Including about 15,000mi of use cycling.
darn tough live up to the name. pendelton wool socks, icebreaker, smart wool all burnt out pretty fast.
They also have a lifetime warranty which is great. With enough use their socks still eventually wear out, but you can get a new pair for free.
> 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.
Carhartt are the most durable clothes I own. Whatever Levi’s did, their jeans went from lasting years to literal months before they would rip. Had the same 3 pairs of Carhartt work pants for half a decade with no end in sight.
Maybe something changed between 2020 and 2025, shrug
I used to swear by them but I ordered like half a dozen pairs of their standard double fronted work dungs and they fell apart in the washer after 2-3 cycles. This was 2022-2023. It was weird, seams weren't stitched properly, the fabric was lighter, etc. I saw comments on their site which shared my experience.
I think this around the time they shifted production outside the USA (memory is hazy). If you see a "helmets to hardhats" decal on the inside of your pants on the pocket lining, they're US production.
I've switched to Bailey's "Wild Ass" brand of denim work pants for my physical laboring needs, but you have to wear them with logging suspenders.
Commented elsewhere but you can still get the Union made USA pants; model B01. Avoid pretty much everything else
I will have to try these Baileys though, how do they fit?
Good to know, I might give them a shot again. For Wild Ass, I'd go up probably two-four sizes from your Carhartts. If you're a 32 in Carhartt you'll want at least a 34 in WA. Go for 36 if the Carhartts are snug. WA will shrink slightly too.
Levis stuff has been made overseas for decades now. It's only with the more recent shift towards using cotton blends in nearly of their jeans that the longevity has suffered.
The Levis's brand doesn't mean much anymore. They sell the same style (model number) of jeans at completely different price points for different stores at varying levels of quality.
You can buy Levi's at $30 at Walmart, $40 at Costco, $80 at a Levi's store, or $100 at Nordstrom.
How Levi's Sells the Same Jeans at Different Prices | Levi's 505 Teardown | Industry Secrets
> Maybe something changed between 2020 and 2025, shrug
It's my understanding that this is the case. I could be wrong; I hope to be.
I can’t believe I’m chiming in on HN about work pants… The B01 are the only pants still Union made in the USA. AFAIK they still are durable as hell, I’m wearing them now.
The rest (mostly stretchy but some normal ‘washed’ duck) are imported and the quality is traded for fashion/lifestyle
Outside of what has been mentioned here (thanks folks for some new brands) I've found clusters in Canada and Portugal of great clothing brands making quality products with good materials:
Canada - Anian (https://anianmfg.com/) for wool products. - Reigning Champ (https://reigningchamp.com/) for cotton tees.
Portugal - La Paz (https://lapaz.pt/) - Isto (https://isto.pt/) - Portugese Flannel (https://www.portugueseflannel.com/)
I also like this site No Man Walks Alone to find quality brands. It is about learning how to spot quality though in stitching and fabrics. Wish there was more educational materials out there on this.
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 ...
Along these lines, watch these two videos from Bernadette Banner to learn how to identify fabric types and learn how to identify quality features in clothing:
H&M is awful, but Uniqlo has some great products that will last. I’m a big fan of a few of their t-shirts, especially the heavy cotton tees. You really gotta get your hands on each product to know what’s worth the money though.
Uniqlo does still have some gems, but it's been rapidly enshittifying. My uniqlo clothes from 2019 are incomparable to what they have today. Some of their stuff is still good, but it's a game of roulette every time, because they'll replace products with very similarly branded new versions that suck.
This matches my experience. 2019 was about the last time you could walk into a Uniqlo, grab an item at random and walk out with something reasonable. Just after that we had Covid and the everything bubble which broke a lot of companies. Uniqlo was one of the casualties.
They either had to dramatically increase the price or lower the quality of their stock. It is pretty obvious which choice they made. You get what you pay for.
At least in Australia I haven't had an issue with anything from Uniqlo. Their shirts have lasted longer than almost all the other stores I've bought from.
They do have some polyester crap, but they are better than most at having 100% cotton options.
Might be a US-only thing. I've heard Uniqlo in Japan is totally different from the ones in the US.
And this where the (independent!) physical store shines. I wish we had more discerning tradesmen these days. Something important went with the brick and mortar stores.
Some of these exist now in the form of (maybe) physical store (or online-only) plus youtube personality, of course.
I went through an Uniqlo last month and was very disappointed at how just about every sort of basic article of clothing I was looking for was at least 30% polyester. Polyester has its place, the fact its not breathable and cheap does make it genuinely useful in moderation to help warm certain articles, but I don't want it in every single basic t shirt and pair of pants.
You can still get high quality or at the very least 100% Cotton clothes there but you'll have to seek them out and they know people will pay a premium for them so they tend to be 2x or more the price of the popular Airism t shirts for example.
I did give up entirely on trying to find outerwear there that was at least roughly >80% organic materials like cotton or wool which was probably my biggest disappointment. You can find nice basics with good quality fabrics at many brands. But Uniqlo 10 years ago was my favorite for wintertime because they're one of the few that had affordable coats and outerwear that made use of real wool + down with good quality lining, excellent heat-tech jackets that used a great blend of breathable fabric + artificial ones to keep you warm but not sweating. I've worn an Uniqlo duffel coat, peacoat, and several jackets every year for the better part of a decade and they still hold up excellent besides some pilling on the coats that I haven't fixed yet.
They don't even really seem to carry proper coats anymore in their stores nor decent jackets, everything seems like the cheap polyester fleeces and puffer coats that everyone else has.
I had a fascination with 100% cotton clothing about ten years ago. These days I don’t. I’m working out a lot more and I care more about quick-drying and moisture-wicking fabrics. I suppose I’m a victim of the athleisure trend where athletic wear becomes everyday wear.
I sweat a lot and as a result try to avoid cotton for the most part. Wool is just a far better material in my experience, and doesn’t hold odor like cotton.
Problem is most wools are "super wash" aka coated in plastic. Real wool is expensive and finicky, even when hand washed.
Cotton _is_ more expensive than polyester, just as a raw material. That's pretty much the whole reason they put it in clothes. So the fact that 100% cotton is more expensive than a cotton poly blend is not surprising or unreasonable.
It's even more complicated. Many brands don't manufacture their own products. Or only manufacture some of them. They license to many manufacturers, typically. The same manufacturer may make the same or similar products for multiple brands too, even further complicating things.
As you've said, you really can't judge by the brand.
A shop like http://blueowl.us (slightly more focused on jeans) or https://witheredfig.com both will give you lots of ideas of great brands. They’re both basically anti fast fashion. Recommend order from them directly, but worst case give some ideas. I invested in high quality tee shirts and pants and have been wearing them for almost a decade.
Nudies jeans are worth the premium (ish) price, and have lifetime free repairs. Extremely comfortable too. Going on 5 years in my current pair
they gave two :)
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.
Supima Cotton t-shirts from Lands End are great. Or, "100% Pima Cotton" from anyone else.
Snow Peak has high quality clothing that isn't absurdly expensive. It's very nice and fits well. If you want something higher end I also like Norse Projects. If you want lower end look at Champion - specifically Reverse Weave.
I really like the look of those unbleached + un-dyed shirts, but Unbleached Apparel and Industry of All Nations don't seem to have tall sizes :(
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.
As long as that doorway isn’t made of wood,
or have any cracks for air to enter the door or doorjam,
that 90% relative humidity should be no problem!
Indoor air during wintertime tends to be low humidity in many places, with most residences running humidifiers to reach a comfortable (~35% RH) level. Clothes-drying will both benefit from the first and assist in the latter.
(California is a notable exception.)
In places which are humid during winter-time, cracking a few windows open will allow for equalisation with the outside, again keeping indoor humidity reasonable.
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.
Hah! I live in (I presume) a different part of Texas, and 3 hours on a line might not even see clothes go from "wet" to "damp" in the shade!
It does make it hard to dry clothes when the humidity level is >90% even if you have triple digit temps!
I just try to buy natural or the semi-synthetic cellulose fabrics, there's quite a variety.
Natural fabrics are cotton, silk, wool and linen of course, but the semi-synthetic fabrics like the rayons (viscose, modal, "bamboo", Tencel, Lyocell, Bemberg, and some sorts of artificial silk) are wood cellulose chemically rearranged so they're just cellulose when they reach you.
The fabric referred to as Acetate is cellulose acetate, so not pure cellulose like cotton and rayon but is just as biodegradable and contains no petroleum plastics.
Of course the production process for viscose rayons (not Tencel/Lyocell/Modal - those use a different process) isn't great. It uses carbon disulfide which is a neurotoxin. However it's not a persistent pollutant. Modern factories in the west try to capture and recycle as much carbon disulfide as possible (it's released from the rayon during processing and can be fed back in to the process) but as a lot of factories are in countries with poor controls on this it's hard to tell how many are doing this.
ive recently found some rayon shirts I really like, but how do you wash them without destroying them? everything I've read online says dry cleaning is the only way
For viscose most rayon a gentle cycle in a front loading washing machine is generally fine, though the more silk-like variants are less resilient. You might want to put it in a garment washing bag to make sure it doesn't get stretched while wet. If you don't have that it's dry-clean only.
Varieties like modal and Lyocell are machine washable.
I have recently started refusing to buy all of this plastic filled clothes. If I see any % of it I don't buy it. Period.
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.
Why? Polyester (as one plastic based fiber) gets a lot of flack because low quality clothes tend to use it, but polyester can be a fantastic fabric if done right. Durable, fast drying, and can be completely recycled.
For example, Patagonia tends to have high quality polyesters and has since the 70s. My experience with their fleece is that I can abuse it and it'll come out unaffected on the other end. Pilling now and then that I take down with a pill remover.
Nylon is also a fantastic material, when used appropriately, like for the shell of a jacket.
And don't get me wrong, cotton, wool, and hemp are all fantastic as well. Most of my clothing is those fabrics and they do a damn fine job at what they're good at.
Polyester is great for performance clothing where you need lots of moisture, but it retains stench really poorly compared to other materials.
When I travel, I love my merino + nylon shirts because I can wear them for days without washing and they fairly durable.
One problem with polyester is the amount of microplastics which enter the water supply when washing them. It's an unacceptable amount.
Polyester is biodegradable, albeit slowly.
Unfortunately too slowly for salmon and other pollution sensitive species.
Citation needed.
Degradation Rates of Plastics in the Environment (https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssuschemeng.9b06635) shows PET degrading very slowly in the environment. _Very_ slowly.
Researchers have found bacteria that do degrade PET using esterases though: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aad6359 and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...
So I guess technically it's biodegradable? Though as it's an energy source give bacteria a few hundred years or so.
"Polyesters" is a huge category. PET in plastic bottles is also a polyester, and it can persist for hundreds of years because it's typically in a highly crystalline form that resists fragmentation.
I was talking about polyester fibers. They have multiple orders of magnitude higher surface-area-to-weight ratio.
There are very few good studies of the degradation rate, and they typically focus on bulk products rather than particulates. So we have to rely on indirect evidence, the concentration of nanoplastics near polluted locations typically stays steady rather than keeps increasing. It means that it's in a dynamic equilibrium.
Another data point is lignin. It's a bilogical polymer, but that is not biodegradable in bulk, unless you are a fungus. And fungi don't have some neat enzymes that can degrade it, they just blast it with peroxides. And yes, there are lignin nanoparticles and you can detect them in water. These nanoparticles also don't accumulate and they can be degraded by bacteria because of their high surface area. Even though bacteria can NOT degrade bulk lignin.
I used to have Patagonia clothing and even washing them rather gently would leave a quite a bunch of plastic in the washing machine.
I just don't like plastics and try to avoid them as much as possible.
Pro tip: if your clothes say 100% merino wool or whatever, this is only about the fiber, and they may still be covered in plastic from the "superwash" process (for example, almost all merino wool is)
Yeah. Also while not a conclusive test, any wool that even suggests it could go in the washer is absolutely heavily super wash processed.
Oh, so that's why my fancy 100% Merino wool sweaters don't stink like wet dog when wet, like regular vintage wool sweaters? I know there had to something different in the manufacturing process.
Link to more details ?
Search for Superwash, Hercosett 125 and machine-washable wool.
Also mentioned here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wool#History
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.
Had my Nudie jeans for about 5 year wearing them probably 4 days a week averaged over the whole time. Indeed the frequent cycling killed them, but it took quite a while. Now I'm figuring out when to bring them to their free repair service to see if I can get a prolonged live for them.
Disclaimer: cycled probably only 15 minutes a day with them averaged over the whole time, but really hard to say, so your millage might vary
Look for pants with a "gusseted crotch". There are also bicycle specific commuting pants that have this feature.
Hemp fibers are tougher then cotton Ironically, that's why hemp is comonnly used to make thinner more airy and less heavy fabrics. So the final products aren't always more resistant to wear and tear just because fibers are
I’ve been going the same direction lately. We have enough plastic in our environment, the last thing I need is to be wearing it. It’s probably a bit paranoid just from a health perspective, but I’ve found that I genuinely prefer the feel/look of natural fibers.
I tried that but quickly found out that a bit of polyester makes clothes MUCH more durable. It doesn't matter for bath robes, but underwear or socks with just 5% of polyester last almost 10x longer.
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.
Do not dry your cotton shirts in the dryer. It's as easy as that. You hang them up and let them air dry. They'll last forever.
In New Zealand, culturally people generally use dryers only when it is too wet to hang them outside. Dryers are seen as wasteful and destructive. T-shirts last longer but they do not last forever. Quality has gone down substantially.
Yes completely agree. I always hang up my washing (also in NZ, don't have a dryer) and was recently sorting through my tshirts as we are moving country. I have one t-shirt that is nearly 20 years old and still holds its shape (though the color and print has faded) on the other hand i threw away a bunch of other t shirts which were just over a year old because they developed holes and particularly the collar is completely broken. Funnily their color and print is mostly fine.
I don't think brand is a good predictor either, e.g. the old t shirt is from threadless IIRC while I had many other threadless tshirts which didn't last near as long.
But I have 90s t-shirts that are just now dying after all these years of being dried only in an electric dryer, and other t-shirts just a few years old that are disintegrating. There's definitely been a quality change in the average shirt.
Inflation halved the value of money since the 90s. If you haven't been paying double for your shirts then the quality hasn't changed but your price expectations subtly did.
We see this everywhere. Manufacturers moving to more disposable products to keep the average prices within consumer expectations. Shirts and Cars certainly ain't "what they used to be."
Cotton shirts aren't valuable enough to treat this gingerly. I hang dry my merino, but it's easier to just buy new cotton shirts every five years or so. That's a good run for clothing.
I had the exhaust vent disconnect. Still think of the amount of microplastics I must have inhaled then
I wonder what impact those plastic bits used to attach tags to clothing have on durability. Woven/knit products kind of have a countdown that starts when threads break, and those tags tend to mean your clothing already has broken threads right from the store.
Most tshirts I've seen have a tiny fabric loop on the collar where the tag can be attached without puncturing the fabric.
I hold my breath when I clean the lint trap, replace it and start the drier, then leave the laundry room and take a breath. I’m still probably inhaling some fibers but it makes me feel like I’m doing something.
Probably be easier to just where an N95 (or even a cloth mask, these aren't really small particles) when changing the lint trap, to the extent this is a concern.
That was me - until today. Now I've got a newish Dyson that was annoying to use on floors stashed under the water heater with a sneaky hose extension that flips up to deal with lint without even removing the filter all the way. It has a good filter on it and the container should hold months of lint.
Next question...how do I empty the Dyson container. Ha!
My following comment is not about clothes, but not long ago I washed some curtains that were hanging in a window for some fifteen years. The amount of lint that came out in the dryer was incredible. I'm talking inch-thick wad on the filter screen, growing another inch with continued drying, after being removed.
It was probably due to years of UV breakdown of the fibers from daylight.
Or accumulation of (invisible) hair and clothing fibers by the coarse curtain fabric over the years.
The lint had a very homogeneous consistency: it was almost snow white with few inclusions deviating from that, almost resembling polyester pillow stuffing in some regards, except for having a different structure (much shorter fiber strands, probably).
You are actually seeing something the linked article doesn't even mention: fiber length.
Not all cotton is created equally. "Egyptian cotton" was long prized because of the long fiber lengths. Cotton fibers are very smooth and slick, and only stay together in thread because of friction along their length as they lay with neighbor fibers (often twisted, where friction becomes exponential instead of linear). Short-fiber cotton is cheaper and easier to source; ergo, cheaper clothing tends to be made of it. Short fibers are also much more likely to slip within the thread under heat, lubrication, and motion (washing and drying). Obviously, they are also more likely to completely fall out of the thread, creating lint.
This is really only true for cotton and very similar fibers. Linen fibers are generally all multiple inches long, so there's less of a quality issue (they are made from rotting away everything but the longitudinal support fibers of the plant stalks).
Wool varies greatly in surface texture, especially after modern chemical processing, and fiber length isn't an issue because the fibers are also inch-long or better. It shrinks, however, because its friction is SO HIGH that it won't give up (stretch back) once it gets bound up.
Silk fibers super slick, but are several yards/meters long; a single cocoon is made from a single thread. They are much slicker than cotton (and therefore harder to hand-spin), but by the time they are made into thread they have plenty of surface friction maintaining their position in the thread.
Artificial fibers are as long as the production shift lasts, so effectively infinite.
Unfortunately about linen, they often "cottonize" it to use on cotton machines. They just chop that long fiber into short ones, negating much of the benefit. I haven't figured out how to tell the difference.
I hadn’t considered that, but I have also paid to get my laundry done for the last 15+ years, it is the greatest luxury.
Hang dry clothing to avoid the drying machine issues all together and it is much gentler on the clothing.
> Is anyone else freaked out about cleaning their dryer's lint filter given all the new fabric materials?
I used to be. So I spent quite a lot of time researching the issue. Not just google searches, but actually speaking with biologists.
I think that the current microplastic scare is overblown. The "credit card worth of plastic in brain" articles are just ridiculous. Biologically, the body has defenses against microscopic contaminants in blood. There are special immune cells that "eat" insoluble particles and then get excreted (typically in bile).
It looks like I'm not alone in my bafflement: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/01/scary-research-... or https://www.vox.com/climate/475004/microplastics-research-fa...
Nearly every environment-adjacent field has concern nannies who make unrealistic risk assessments which then get regurgitated into guilt-inspiring newspaper articles. This is especially common when there is no way to determine for certain what the actual risk is; some folks fall on the "allow zero risk" side.
Some concern is warranted. I think that plasticizer or dyes leaching from plastics is a very real problem, so I try to avoid food stored in plastic containers (this includes tin cans, they are often lined with plastic).
This is a solvable problem, though. Polyethylene doesn't need plasticizers.
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.
There have been changes in the manufacturing process to "pre-shrink" fabrics.
Similar improvements have been made to improve colorfastness. Mixing new reds and whites used to consistently produce pink. Not anymore.
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.
I was actually spoiled by the fact that self-assembled furniture typically does not require any power tools. Then I bought a bike rack and was disappointed that the first step required a drill.
Still happens sometimes, especially if you do warmer water.
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.
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.
That's a weird topic for an 80s band fan site, but ok.
did you ever ask yourself what the name of the band meant?
Better not to ask. :P
Pretty soon you find out Frankie wasn't even in the band; The Pet Shop Boys didn't sell dog food at all; Dexy has terrible lap times; the Elfmans weren't actually knighted; etc.
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 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.
EDIT: I'm sure they are nowhere near the only brand to use that particular mix of fibers (mostly a variety of polyester/Spandex mixes depending on the shirt), just the one whose shirts I own. And the "fishing" bit is about the designs - very heavy on the fishing/hunting designs.
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 was about to write this. Heat pump dryers take a little longer, but they are so much gentler on clothes.
I had the same experience until this year, when a shirt I got in the airport on the way home from Philly suddenly became a present for my girlfriend.
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.
I had that issue but as it turns out I was just getting fatter
Lol, this happened to me the first time I started gaining weight in my early 30's.
As silly as this sounds, the same thing happened to me. I was getting pretty frustrated because all of my pants kept shrinking.. the truth hurt.
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 :)
Linen typically means flax fibers.
Oh, huh, TIL. I always thought it was a different way of processing cotton... but I just checked my closet and it looks like some of my stuff is a cotton/linen blend, which might be partly why I was confused. And would explain why some items wrinkle worse than others :P
In any case, both cotton and linen get the cold-water treatment from me!
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 tend to find that older (10+ years) t-shirts shrink a lot. Even if I don't wash them.
I literally have a t-shirt from 1997 that doesn't shrink in our machines. :D
I think you may not have fully appreciated the comment you replied to
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.
Earlier commenter was talking about getting fatter as they age. Not actual cloths shrinkage.
Ha! Ok, yeah, I definitely missed that aspect of the joke. :D
> Note that I fully understand it for the anecdotal weight that it has.
At this point I thought you were going for an ahem heavy-handed joke.