Shit! My favorite t-shirt (this one) has a hole in it. The fucker’s only 8 months old! Looking at some other shirts I’ve bought in the last few years, I see the same thing. WTF? If I dig in the dresser a little bit, I can find concert Ts from 25 years ago that are still completely intact. The lettering may be almost gone, and they may be faded more than a little, but there aren’t any holes! And I can’t blame the cats, because the holes often are in places they don’t perch. If I am going to shell out $15 for a souvenir shirt, it had better last past the first frakking anniversary of the event! I don’t think this is too much to ask of my clothing.
Don’t get me started on how the new Supergirl is the spitting image of Michael Turner’s mother.
Women’s t-shirts tend to suffer from this phenomenon to the point where many of the shirts available are thin and gauzy and will not likely last beyond five or six washings in the cold cycle. Do clothing manufacturers really think that we want our clothing to be this disposable?
Disparage not the Aloha shirt, folks. That’s sacred ground. Mahalo so much.
I don’t think it’s so much that shirts today are worse than those of yesteryear. It’s just that some have high quality, and some don’t. I have both new and old Ts that are still in great shape.
Actually, I think I need to start shopping at the 10 for a dollar aisle. Then I would expect them to fall apart after 3 months. But when I spend $15 for a shirt, I expect it to last. At least for a year or so. Am I asking too much here?
And those same shirts are $18. I’m paying nearly twenty dollars for something that, if you unraveled it and knit it properly, would yield enough fabric to clothe a ferret? Guys, twenty dollar is too much for a ferret shirt. And serging the bottom of a t-shirt? Not a substitute for a hem.
My preference for wearing sweaters and camisoles has suddenly become much clearer.
I got some 5/$10 t-shirts last year, four of which are still completely intact after multiple wearings. The fifth one has one tiny hole in it. Whereas several shirts that I paid far, far more have developed holes within months of their purchase.
My three favorite tees are from the late '80s/early '90s – they’ve been worn so often they’re soft as butter and feel wonderful to sleep in. And yet they don’t have a single hole, anywhere, after all these years.
My problem with T-shirts is exactly the opposite - they’re too well-made these days. Which means that there’s about a two-week period each spring and fall when you can wear your T-shirt with the interesting image or saying as outerwear; the rest of the time it’s too cold to wear short sleeves, or too hot to wear a T-shirt made of such heavy fabric.
So my T-shirt collection is a mix of 15-25 year old summer-weight tees that you can pretty much see through on account of being worn so much, and more recent tees that are too heavy to wear once the weather gets warm.
That might work for some people. But I don’t like the feel of long-sleeved tees (I own a couple of them, but rarely wear them for that reason) or thermals, and I really don’t like the look of wearing a t-shirt over something else.
My real problem is that I’m running out of t-shirts I can comfortably wear during the summer.
