I Tested Every Plain White T-Shirt Available and Found the Real Best One As Told To Luke Coutinho You might think I’m crazy. Girlfriend definitely thinks I’m crazy. She has every right to.
When shirts began arriving at our Brooklyn apartment in bulk every few days for three weeks straight, my significant other’s sanity endured what mental-health professionals may clinically refer to as “acute distress.” By the time I’d organized them all into categories and spread them out like some weird textile-centric art installation across every available horizontal surface in our apartment, she was openly scornful of my choices. “This is for work,” I explained for what felt like the thousandth time as another box landed on the coffee table. “I need to do this.” “You’re not working,” she said, gingerly stepping over a pile separating two categories as if navigating amber iodine. “You’re obsessing.” She isn’t wrong. But allow me to explain. The white tee might be the most elemental piece in a man’s wardrobe.
It’s the base. Learn how to stack shit on top of it correctly, and you’ve got yourself a well put-together dude.
It’s also the one item of clothing that most guys buy the least thoughtfully.
We wander into the drugstore or grocery store and grab whichever multipack is on sale or whatever we see first off the rack. Hardly any of us consider what we want from a great plain white shirt before we buy. We just buy.
I wanted to break that cycle. I wanted to find – the very best plain white t-shirt. Not the best shirt for the price.
Not your run-of-the-mill J. Crew generic. I want to know what the absolute best plain white tee is out there, period.
I’m here to tell you. To do that, I needed to establish some benchmarks. What characteristics make a great white shirt?
After consulting with cotton gurus, apparel designers, cotton obsessives who wear logo-striped shirts embroidered with their name to showcase their collections, I decided on five variables to test for: 1. Material (weight/thickness, hand feel, transparency) 2. Fit (True to sizing specs shown?) 3.
Construction (see below) 4. Durability (how well do they hold up to repeated washing?) 5. Value (take all those factors into account then price it out) The next step was simple: Collect every white t-shirt of every major style and fit available and test them side by side.
Then wash. A lot. Fit/Construction broke down into several categories.
Was the stitching even? Did the collar stay put or try to curl up like bacon when you washed it? Did the shirt shrink disproportionately in one area compared to others?
Materials seemed like it would be straightforward but wasn’t. Cotton comes in many varieties from many places. Threads are made from either cotton or polyester, and both can be used in the same shirt, which drastically changes how it feels against your skin (more on that later).
Did I test shirts made from sustainable materials only? Cotton exclusively? Of course not.
Guys might like to think their white t-shirts are utilitarian sleep-sacks that exist solely to be covered in vetements logos, but they’re also fashionable. We want them to look and feel good. So I tested as many shirts as I could get my hands on in every conceivable category: Drugstore brands, mid-tier basics, high-end basics, designer styles, retro-inspired styles, performance fabrics, pima cotton, supima cotton.
Prices ranged from $6 to, uh…$120. My credit card company called to make sure I wasn’t being held hostage and forced to buy white shirts against my will. After final measurements were taken on each shirt (yes, I measured every.single.one before washing them for the first time), each was worn for at least a day and then photographed.
Then they were laundered five times using the exact same process, measured again, and then worn some more. I evaluated cotton softness, color consistency, elasticity (do they spring back to original shape or stay baggy? ), collar resilience, and overall feel again and again to document how they evolved with each washing. You should probably run that last sentence by your significant other before attempting this at home.
How did I test for durability? Another word for clothespins would work, but we have professionals for these things: GREYS Lab dips each garment in a simulator filled with cotton-free humans (sometimes called “skin”) to test for color fade and wear. We subjected each t-shirt to the same five washes, photographing and measuring each one before and after each wash.
The process was arduous and looked a little something like this: WAIVES Lab also used aColorFast tester to measure color fade on white garments after repeated washing. Armed with all that data, I am possibly now the smartest guy in the world on the subject of plain white t-shirts. Allow me to educate.
There were a lot of surprises. Some you’ll see below. For starters, there’s far less correlation between price and quality than you’d think.
I’ve poured over the data, and shirts in the $80+ range were some of both the best and worst-performing specimens in all categories. And I’m sorry to say that some of the worst offenders – meaning they lost the most dimension and became “hole-y Afghanistan” shirts the quickest – were from some pretty famous brands. I’ll get to that, but first: Buying cheap definitely doesn’t equal terrible, but … put some thought into what you’re buying.
If you simply need a weekender shirt and don’t care if it falls apart after six months, Walmart and Target basically sell the same shirt Goodfellow & Co makes for roughly $12 a pop when you buy them in a multipack. They outperformed shirts four times their price point in wash tests and constructability. The Hanes Premium (not the “regular” brand you get at Sam’s Club) also consistently sized true to measurements across multiple samples and faded very little over a five wash testing regimen.
Are $120 shirts better than $12 shirts? Of course not. I already told you that upthread.
For true luxury, American-made brands from those reviving domestic manufacturing like Lady White Co. and Merz b. Schwanen blew every other shirt out of the water in terms of how they felt against your skin. I’m a big fan of Sunspel and James Perse t-shirts, but their fit and fabric didn’t hold up to scrutiny quite as well as some of the other options I tried.
Mid-tier brands like Buck Mason and Reigning Champ also impressed here. What’s the best overall shirt? Considering all factors plus value, I give the title of best all-round plain white t-shirt to the Knickerbocker Manufacturing Company‘s Standard Issue Slub Tee.
Why? Let’s break this down by my benchmark categories: Material: This shirt comes in at a 6.2 oz medium-weight organic cotton with a subtle slub texture. Yes, it feels fancy as hell.
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But it’s the kind of fancy that doesn’t looktry-hard. It maintains its integrity through multiple washes and shows almost no sign of shrinkage (diminished less than 2% in any direction through five washes). The collar also stayed perfectly symmetrical throughout every test.
If your go-to plain white shirt isn’t able to do those three things, buy this shirt instead. Construction: The details on this shirt are where Knickerbocker really shines. The clean-finished interior seams and fully taped shoulders are indicative of a brand that cares about what goes into their shirts, down to the double-felled seams.
That attention to detail translates into a better product at every turn. Value: At $55 it’s not cheap, but it shouldn’t be. You get what you pay for here.
Compared to every other option I tested, this is the best shirt you can buy that won’t require liquidating your retirement account. How does it feel? After each wash, it only got softer and looked even newer.
You’d never know it was washed five times unless I told you. That’s the whole point of this guy. Have a smaller budget?
Good news! Our Value Pick, the Goodfellow & Co Premium T-shirt, won’t break the bank at $12 a shirt. I don’t love that the material is thinner (good whites these days feel so heavy! ), but they stood up to repeated washings like a champ considering the price point.
While not quite as well-constructed as our overall winner, fit remained true to size specifications, and they faded barely at all over five washes. This is exactly the kind of shirt you want for if you’re just looking for something to throw on when fishing orworking on your tan. For the diamond-cut t-shirt you’ve been dreaming of but are literally scared to purchase because you’ve heard the north of $100 price tag, look no further than Merz b.
Schwanen’s entry level offering, the 215 model. It was noticeably softer and more luxurious than any other shirt I tested. The fabric has a three-dimensional quality that creates excellent airflow while retaining enough weight to maintain opacity.
But here’s the thing: This brand took everything I loved about the Knickerbocker Manufacturing Company shirt and improved upon it in nearly every way, making it feel more luxurious than any other shirt I tested. The problem? It doesn’t improve on it enough to justify the price for daily wear.
Save your Benjamin’s and stick with the KMC if you ask me. Do you have broad shoulders and a narrow waist? Get yourself a Reigning Champ or Lady White Co. shirt.
They run notoriously oversized, but that actually works to your advantage if you’re more flesh wear mountains than valley. More room through the chest and shoulders with a tailored look? Yes, please.
Are you tall and thin? Try Buck Mason’s curved hem tees. Regular t-shirts have the unfortunate tendency to fall out of your pants when you sit down if you’re taller than average.
These babies fit like a traditional tee but have a slight curve built into the bottom hem to keep everything looking proportional. Just want a solid undershirt? Try Uniqlo’s Supima Cotton Crewneck .
They are by far the softest, finest cotton shirts I tested, making them ideal for wear under dress shirts where you don’t want texture popping through. They also scored well in all areas tested. Sad well-known brand whose basic tees completely slayed it?
Everlane . Their minimalist shirt outperformed every other shirt I tested under $40, making it the best bang-for-your-buck brand out there. They’ve also been extremely transparent about the “milieu interior” wool they use to produce their clothes, so you know you’re not being fucked over.
Most disappointed famous brand? Calvin Klein. Shocking, I know.
Despite being one of the first brands that come to mind for many guys when picturing a plain white tee, their shirts fall apart literally after one wear. Color started fading out of the collar after two washes. Meanwhile, Gap’s basic tees also showed a surprising amount of variance between two supposedly identical shirts in terms of fit.
Say what you will about American Apparel, but at least their sizing was always consistent. Did you know there’s actually a wrong way to wash t-shirts? We do it all wrong.
Most of us anyway. Spend the extra five minutes washing them in cold with minimal detergent (about half of what the instructions say to use works fine), and hang them to air dry whenever possible. Don’t bother with fabric softeners – they actually coat the cotton fibers and decrease breathability.
Do this, and your t-shirts will last longer than my mom’s emotions during a Wonderwall cover at karaoke. So what’s the best t-shirt brand? It doesn’t exist.
There’s no one-size-fits-all answer here. For every boujee Mercer shirt I tore through testing, I found a drugstore twin twice its price that stood up to repeated washings like a boss.
Pick a style you like, pay attention to how it feels when you’re trying it on, and take careful note of how it fits wherever it sits loosest (around your chest and shoulders for most guys).
Is it too tight? Too loose? Does it feel like it’s gonna fall apart the first time you wash it?
Is it Made In Cambodia ? Good signs none of those things are true. If they are, return that bad boy and try another.
I kept almost all of these shirts for different reasons. Rest easy knowing I will be donating the vast majority of them to a local clothing drive once I’m done fetishizing them for this article. And rest easy, girlfriend.
Life may have never been the same for you and I after “the shirt project,” but our apartment is finally back to being livable. That’s love.
