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.
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?
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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)
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 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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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 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 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 :(.
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 can only wear tall-size clothing, and generally I've found that none of my t-shirts shrink "in", but they _all_ shrink "up". I can make them last longer washing them delicate and "air-drying" (in the dryer, light or no heat), but eventually they all get shorter. I have to replace most of my undershirts annually, and I rarely bother with t-shirts anymore.
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.
Ha. I modified my Whirlpool dryer with an Arduino-based automation because its own internal sensor is not precise. I used this nice sensor: https://www.adafruit.com/product/4099
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 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.
Stretch jeans suck in general. Rather quickly the elastane will give up and the fabric rips. Thankfully, non stretch wide/straight jeans are back in trend.
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.
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?
I'm with you 100% -- shrinking tees and shrinking sleeves were the bane of my existence, I'd buy my proper size but they would only be wearable like 5 times until they got too short. But if I bought a size up, I'd be swimming in them horizontally even after they shrank. (The people here saying that shrinkage isn't a problem anymore, I have no idea what they're talking about. Maybe they wear a baggy/long style of clothing so it doesn't matter? And I don't care how supposedly "preshrunk" cotton is, it's not preshrunk enough.)
Now I just wash on cold and hang dry all my cotton shirts, tees and button-ups. Just use a folding drying rack as simple as this:
It's a little annoying to have to leave the rack out in the middle of some room to dry overnight, but zero shrinkage ever. The way it fit in the store is the way it still fits three years later.
And no, stretching with conditioner/shampoo doesn't work, because there's no easy way to stretch it the "right" way -- as you tug on spots at the neck and the waist to pull them apart, they stretch but in weird, inconsistent, lumpy ways. The final result just looks like you've had small kids trying to hang from different spots on your shirt and it's all out of shape. Maybe in theory if you had some kind of stretching system with long clamps or something it could work, but who has that? Doing it by hand, it's definitely not a solution.
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.
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
I have this problem with button down shirts. I buy one that fits me perfectly and then all of a sudden months later its too small in the sleeves. I wash them very carefully. Only cold water, and air dry. This helps somewhat but the problem seems to re-occur still. I'll try the delicate cycle on the washer, but it's incredibly frustrating.
Make sure they are pre-shrunk cotton. It can still shrink, but far less.
Make sure the shirt is sized so that when you extend your arm laterally, the cuff approaches your knuckle.
If your idea of a fitting shirt happens to be that the cuff just covers a wrist watch when you extend your arm, then you have no spare headroom for shrinkage.
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).
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.
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. The lifetime warranty and repairs offered by Patagonia speak for themselves I think.
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.
> Textile scientists and engineers are also working on fabrics that resist shrinkage through advanced material design. Among promising innovations are blended yarns that combine natural and synthetic fibres.
What odd language!
The fact that cotton-poly blends resist shrinking and wrinkling better than natural fibers has been known for like 80 years. While it may be that research continues, the "promising innovation" era of this category lapsed eons ago.
I'm also mystified why the article would not at least acknowledge the existence of something called pre-shrunk cotton, which is a material that is put through processes that cause shrinking before being measured and cut for clothing, to minimize further after-market shrinkage for the consumer.
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.
A "parenthetical dash" (the semantic meaning) can be typeset either as an em dash (a typographic meaning) without spaces, or as an en dash (a typographic meaning) surrounded by spaces. And the latter is often referred to as an em dash (as a semantic meaning), since basically everyone uses that to mean "parenthetical dash" which is the correct term but a term that virtually nobody uses.
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.
> Textile scientists and engineers are also working on fabrics that resist shrinkage through advanced material design. Among promising innovations are blended yarns that combine natural and synthetic fibres.
Can someone who knows things about textiles explain to me how the above is different than all the many items I own that say on the label, 60%/40% blend polyester/cotton, etc. I assumed that's what these were.
I want someone to engineer a fabric / fibre that grows with each wash rather than shrinks. I feel like with modern materials science it must be possible.
I'd use it for children's clothes. After you wash the clothes, you wait for the kid to grow a bit before they wear it again. No more growing out of your favourite things.
Anyone who is a little bigger ever noticed how it doesn't really matter what size you buy because after a few washes they all shrink down to the same size? Makes me think it's the same amount of fabric being used so the shirt even if it's sold as a bigger size, ultimately reverts back to another size over time.
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.
I bought a SpeedQueen washer-dryer set to have a dedicated wool wash option to care for my Gustin wool flannels and various 100% merino wool sweaters. Does that count?
I would imagine most people on this site don't deal with clothes shrinking any more because they are wearing screen-printed, startup-logo-emblazoned tri-blend t-shirts with a very low cotton count. So even though the shirt is presumably using the cheapest, gnarliest short-staple cotton the manufacturer could get his hands on, the sheer amount of manmade fibers in it allows that Custom Ink goodness to remain firmly a Medium for years. Well, that and the hugely boxy fit. How would you notice if any of it shrank?
"Modern" dryers' ability to tumble clothes on low until they are still pretty damp, but now wrinkle-free, then pull it out to finish on a rack means I don't have to give much thought to the proper maintenance of 99% cotton jeans or 100% duck canvas pants. I don't think the 100% cotton American Giant shirts and hoodies are particularly prone to shrinking, either, but they do seem to soak up stains more readily than American Apparel's tri-blends given away as swag.
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.
The default for all people should to cold wash and hang dry what they care about taking care of, and to use extra-low-heat on what they don't care about.
Indoor hang drying is easy. Get a box fan, and a de-humidifier. Both are about 20$ USD. Now you don't even need to open the windows or worry about what's going on outside.
I went from zero to hero with clothes when I realized I should care about them, and seeing the night and day difference in how long my clothes last has been jarring. Shrinkage is a thing of the past.
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.
That doesn't even make sense. Banana Republic cotton is fine. I have a bunch of their shirts and machine wash cold and hang-dry and zero shrinkage.
Did you put it in the dryer afterwards or something? Like I know that sounds dumb but I'm struggling to imagine what could have possibly caused what you describe.
There's zero "enshittification" of the cotton at a brand like Banana Republic.
What I'm relating is 100% the truth, and I did not machine dry them after washing. I could not even believe my eyes when it happened, because I've been a customer of their dress shirts since like a decade ago and always relied on them for a precise fit.
I bought two of them, the ones that shrunk. They are labeled as wrinkle-resistant slim shirts, 98% cotton and 2% spandex.
Don't be mistaken, the quality of their apparel has definitely gone down of late. I went on Reddit and its definitely a thing people have noticed.
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'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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Your symptoms are pretty similar to what I experienced after using a dry powder fire extinguisher in a confined space a few years ago.
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?
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If you were never a smoker, hopefully your mucociliary escalator can deal with all the lint you inhaled!
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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?
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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 :(
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 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.
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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.
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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.
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Or, if you are using a dryer, keep the heat low to moderate.
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.
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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)
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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.
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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.
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.
> 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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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.
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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!
So I'm not the only one.
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.
Velva sheen makes some decent sweats and hoodies.
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.
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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.
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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 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.
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.
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
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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 :)
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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.
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Even cheap band t-shirts don't shrink in our dryer. I have sweaters that I am confident would have shrunk in the past, but do just fine here.
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.
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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.
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I can only wear tall-size clothing, and generally I've found that none of my t-shirts shrink "in", but they _all_ shrink "up". I can make them last longer washing them delicate and "air-drying" (in the dryer, light or no heat), but eventually they all get shorter. I have to replace most of my undershirts annually, and I rarely bother with t-shirts anymore.
I have that same problem but I attributed it to gaining weight. I'm sure it's the shirts.
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.
Ha. I modified my Whirlpool dryer with an Arduino-based automation because its own internal sensor is not precise. I used this nice sensor: https://www.adafruit.com/product/4099
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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.
A lot of cotton is pre-shrunk. Simple as that. Synthetics resist shrinking.
The last thing I had shrink on me was a wool sweater, which was over twenty years ago.
I used the hair conditioner trick to stretch it (same as in this article), which sort of worked.
Most cotton is preshrunk now
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.
I am not using a dryer, only a washing machine.
Can UV do that?
I see the same. Usually with synthetic fibers.
It's rarely an issue with coton, but it's still a problem with cashmere or wool. Even on the most delicate settings you can have surprises
Stretch jeans shrink, even in a heat pump dryer set to a gentle program. Yes, they really do :(
Stretch jeans suck in general. Rather quickly the elastane will give up and the fabric rips. Thankfully, non stretch wide/straight jeans are back in trend.
You have to buy hipster clothes to have it happen
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. :)
Check your (wet) pockets and waistbands more often.
Those sensors, across brands, are absolute garbage.
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.
I have a heat pump dryer, and I can confirm no shrinkage.
It's very gentle on clothes, but it does take a bit longer to dry.
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
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I absolutely shrunk my ex's marino wool in a heat pump dryer once. But I haven't had any issues with cotton.
Do you have pointers to good sources you've found about that? I've been wondering about exactly this from an optimization-of-the-laundry perspective.
(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.)
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.
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Me and the wife have so many discussions about this :)
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 think it's definitely possible to gain weight between wash cycles when living in America.
That's happening to me too! My trousers are selectively shrinking around the waistband, it's weird...
Just come with a tape-style tape measure,
should remove the delicacy.
funny & true :-)
do you dry on high or wash on hot? I'd recommend low and cold.
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?
I'm with you 100% -- shrinking tees and shrinking sleeves were the bane of my existence, I'd buy my proper size but they would only be wearable like 5 times until they got too short. But if I bought a size up, I'd be swimming in them horizontally even after they shrank. (The people here saying that shrinkage isn't a problem anymore, I have no idea what they're talking about. Maybe they wear a baggy/long style of clothing so it doesn't matter? And I don't care how supposedly "preshrunk" cotton is, it's not preshrunk enough.)
Now I just wash on cold and hang dry all my cotton shirts, tees and button-ups. Just use a folding drying rack as simple as this:
https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/mulig-drying-rack-indoor-outdoo...
It's a little annoying to have to leave the rack out in the middle of some room to dry overnight, but zero shrinkage ever. The way it fit in the store is the way it still fits three years later.
And no, stretching with conditioner/shampoo doesn't work, because there's no easy way to stretch it the "right" way -- as you tug on spots at the neck and the waist to pull them apart, they stretch but in weird, inconsistent, lumpy ways. The final result just looks like you've had small kids trying to hang from different spots on your shirt and it's all out of shape. Maybe in theory if you had some kind of stretching system with long clamps or something it could work, but who has that? Doing it by hand, it's definitely not a solution.
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
Or get shirts made for people with longer torsos... YMMV
https://www.landsend.com/shop/mens-tall-t-shirts-tops-tees/S...
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You can use a dryer, just don't get all the way dry. Low heat until the shirt is 'damp', then hang to finish drying is what I used to do.
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.
Yes. It works. I bought my wife’s cashmere jumper back from child-sized. Pins, a sheet of ply, and a bunch of time.
I have the following printout in the laundry room. I haven't had any problems with shrinking or fading, etc.
https://www.ihateironing.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/07...
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.
If I have to choose anything but the default wash and dry setting, I'm not worthy of wearing it.
Darwinian washing. I like it.
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.
What the hell does "Do not dry" mean? You have to keep it moist forever?
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
It probably means to air-dry (to not use a dryer)
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I have this problem with button down shirts. I buy one that fits me perfectly and then all of a sudden months later its too small in the sleeves. I wash them very carefully. Only cold water, and air dry. This helps somewhat but the problem seems to re-occur still. I'll try the delicate cycle on the washer, but it's incredibly frustrating.
Make sure they are pre-shrunk cotton. It can still shrink, but far less.
Make sure the shirt is sized so that when you extend your arm laterally, the cuff approaches your knuckle.
If your idea of a fitting shirt happens to be that the cuff just covers a wrist watch when you extend your arm, then you have no spare headroom for shrinkage.
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).
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.
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. The lifetime warranty and repairs offered by Patagonia speak for themselves I think.
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.
> Textile scientists and engineers are also working on fabrics that resist shrinkage through advanced material design. Among promising innovations are blended yarns that combine natural and synthetic fibres.
What odd language!
The fact that cotton-poly blends resist shrinking and wrinkling better than natural fibers has been known for like 80 years. While it may be that research continues, the "promising innovation" era of this category lapsed eons ago.
I'm also mystified why the article would not at least acknowledge the existence of something called pre-shrunk cotton, which is a material that is put through processes that cause shrinking before being measured and cut for clothing, to minimize further after-market shrinkage for the consumer.
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.
It’s not an em-dash, but an en-dash. So it’s incorrectly used.
A "parenthetical dash" (the semantic meaning) can be typeset either as an em dash (a typographic meaning) without spaces, or as an en dash (a typographic meaning) surrounded by spaces. And the latter is often referred to as an em dash (as a semantic meaning), since basically everyone uses that to mean "parenthetical dash" which is the correct term but a term that virtually nobody uses.
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Its correctly used, just not common in American English. <https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/book/ed18/part2/ch06/ps...>
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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.
Just a tip if you want to prevent shrinkage is to not dry clothes you don't want shrinking. I air dry my pants and any shirts I don't want to shrink.
> Textile scientists and engineers are also working on fabrics that resist shrinkage through advanced material design. Among promising innovations are blended yarns that combine natural and synthetic fibres.
Can someone who knows things about textiles explain to me how the above is different than all the many items I own that say on the label, 60%/40% blend polyester/cotton, etc. I assumed that's what these were.
I just buy bigger and wash at 95° once, then no problem.
I want someone to engineer a fabric / fibre that grows with each wash rather than shrinks. I feel like with modern materials science it must be possible.
I'd use it for children's clothes. After you wash the clothes, you wait for the kid to grow a bit before they wear it again. No more growing out of your favourite things.
Where would the extra mass come from? Water? CO2 in the air?
It doesn't need extra mass, it needs to stretch out a bit.
Anyone who is a little bigger ever noticed how it doesn't really matter what size you buy because after a few washes they all shrink down to the same size? Makes me think it's the same amount of fabric being used so the shirt even if it's sold as a bigger size, ultimately reverts back to another size over time.
Just buy them slightly oversize and let them shrink down to the right size.
Difficult when the options are Medium and Large!
This also requires knowing how much it will shrink, and accurately gauging if I've left enough buffer when trying something on at the store.
I accidently mildly shrunk a wool sweater from using warm water instead of cold, and the unshrinking method in the article does not work very much.
I had the opposite problem recently. Where Levi's jeans expanded and loosened up after a couple of washes. What's the reason for that?
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.
All jeans relax by about 1" in the waist after a few wears, because you're literally just mechanically stretching them every time you sit down.
Cotton tees would stretch like that too if you wore them as tight as jeans are worn around the waist. But we don't wear them that way.
That's probably not the washes but due to wear.
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.
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Team no dryer. I have been cold wash + line-drying for my whole adult life; works out. (Unless something is actually soiled; then hot)
Day 39585 of HN not knowing anything about selvedge denim, or other nice quality men’s fashion…
I bought a SpeedQueen washer-dryer set to have a dedicated wool wash option to care for my Gustin wool flannels and various 100% merino wool sweaters. Does that count?
I would imagine most people on this site don't deal with clothes shrinking any more because they are wearing screen-printed, startup-logo-emblazoned tri-blend t-shirts with a very low cotton count. So even though the shirt is presumably using the cheapest, gnarliest short-staple cotton the manufacturer could get his hands on, the sheer amount of manmade fibers in it allows that Custom Ink goodness to remain firmly a Medium for years. Well, that and the hugely boxy fit. How would you notice if any of it shrank?
"Modern" dryers' ability to tumble clothes on low until they are still pretty damp, but now wrinkle-free, then pull it out to finish on a rack means I don't have to give much thought to the proper maintenance of 99% cotton jeans or 100% duck canvas pants. I don't think the 100% cotton American Giant shirts and hoodies are particularly prone to shrinking, either, but they do seem to soak up stains more readily than American Apparel's tri-blends given away as swag.
Yes. I wish Gustin was less hit or miss as a brand.
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.
The default for all people should to cold wash and hang dry what they care about taking care of, and to use extra-low-heat on what they don't care about.
Indoor hang drying is easy. Get a box fan, and a de-humidifier. Both are about 20$ USD. Now you don't even need to open the windows or worry about what's going on outside.
I went from zero to hero with clothes when I realized I should care about them, and seeing the night and day difference in how long my clothes last has been jarring. Shrinkage is a thing of the past.
I'm sure some day we'll notice the consequences. Real soon now...
Eh, selvedge denim these days is just a fashion trend. It's fine, yeah. But there are other clothes one has to wear besides denim.
Wow an article from my university in Melbourne (I am an old alumni), so proud!
i hang dry almost all my clothes. anything i care about. even $5 tshirts.
I just have a different threshold. If it cost $100 or more I’ll hang dry. Otherwise it gets into the dryer.
Wow! Never thought I'd see my little Alma Mater on Hacker News!
The Levi's logo now makes a lot more sense.
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.
That doesn't even make sense. Banana Republic cotton is fine. I have a bunch of their shirts and machine wash cold and hang-dry and zero shrinkage.
Did you put it in the dryer afterwards or something? Like I know that sounds dumb but I'm struggling to imagine what could have possibly caused what you describe.
There's zero "enshittification" of the cotton at a brand like Banana Republic.
What I'm relating is 100% the truth, and I did not machine dry them after washing. I could not even believe my eyes when it happened, because I've been a customer of their dress shirts since like a decade ago and always relied on them for a precise fit.
I bought two of them, the ones that shrunk. They are labeled as wrinkle-resistant slim shirts, 98% cotton and 2% spandex.
Don't be mistaken, the quality of their apparel has definitely gone down of late. I went on Reddit and its definitely a thing people have noticed.
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Do you find there's a difference in cotton quality with different shirt brands that results in some shrinking more than others?
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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.
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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.
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