Threadless T-shirts: good fit for short, skinny guys
Sunday, July 19th, 2009The best advice on this blog often comes from the readers. For instance, in the comments to a recent post about T-shirts, three readers turned me on to a company I’d never heard of before: Threadless, an online retailer/social-networking site, producing limited-edition graphic tees.
I’ve now had a chance to try out a few Threadless T-shirts [Full disclosure: shirts were supplied to me gratis from the company], and think they’re a good fit for short, skinny guys.
THE BRAND:
The basic idea is this: Anyone can upload a design idea to their site. Every week, Threadless’ virtual community votes on the submissions. Winners get $2000, a gift certificate, and their design becomes ink on cotton. Like any successful online community, there’s a lot of participation (beyond just the voting). Users can create profiles, blogs, and post photos of themselves wearing the T-shirts.
What’s cool about that last part is that when you click on a T-shirt, you don’t just get the one official product image or a picture of a model. You can also see photos of every user that uploaded a pic of themselves wearing that particular shirt. They range from relatively normal to themed to candid to just plain goofy. Clearly, everyone’s having fun. So there’s a lot of love and loyalty here.
Threadless also has their own blog and a “Threadspotting” feature, where they post photos of celebs in their tees. Like 5-foot-4 Seth Green.
THE FIT:
When the label first started up, they printed all their designs on shirts they sourced wholesale from American Apparel. If that was still the case, short guys would be out of luck. AA’s T-shirts have always been extremely long. Not satisfied, Threadless developed their own proprietary T-shirt stock a few years back, and it’s a full inch shorter than AA in each size (Specifics on the switch via Wikipedia). And I liked the feel of the cotton a bit better than AA, too: it’s the perfect kind of soft and thin.
I found that brand-new Threadless tees are true to the dimensions listed on the site’s size chart: Size Extra Small is 26.5″Lx16″W; Small is 27.5″L x 18″W; Medium is 28.5″L x 20″W; etc.
But I wanted to see how they would shrink, so I did a cold-water wash (to protect the vivid colors) and a nice warm drying cycle. The result on average was a 5% shrinkage. So, after a decent tumble in the dryer, you can expect Extra Smalls to be 25″L and Smalls to be a little over 26″L (with a corresponding reduction in chest size. Not bad at all.
I’m, 5-foot-5, 125 lbs., and the Extra Smalls are laughably tight on me. Ronald, a longtime Short Shrifted reader/commenter noted that he’s “5-foot-1, 112lbs., (i.e. tiny) and I’ve had good luck with size Small.” So hopefully that tells you just how skinny these run. I’d say that that the Smalls fit me better, too: bottom hem falls at a good length, shoulder seams are where they should be, sleeves hit mid-bicep. It’s borderline too tight in the neck and torso, but I can get away with it (at least, my very kind wife says so). And actually, with just a bit of stretching out the snug areas, I should be good to go.
So as you can see, Threadless works for short guys — but only if you’re skinny. (Graniph’s T-shirts, which I’ll review next time, run a bit wider.)
THE PRICE:
Affordable. Regular shirts range from $15-$25. And they always have loads of sale shirts starting at $9. To promote participation, users get credits toward merch when they vote on new designs or upload pics, so it pays to get involved.
THE DESIGN:
Primarily illustration-based, with some shirts playing with the boundaries of traditional T-shirt design (e.g. images placed far off-center). Their main topical focus seems to be humor, cleverness, visual gags. If that resonates with you, great! I was definitely able to find some shirts that I liked and would buy — it’s almost unavoidable given the sheer number of choices on their site.
However, it’s really a matter of individual taste. Personally, I’m not drawn to most of their jokey designs. I like my puns in casual conversation, not emblazoned on my clothing (How funny is it after the first time?). But that’s me.
It’s interesting. I think the whole crowd-sourcing thing is at work here. On the one hand, the netroots is a very democratic and decentralized way to choose designs, and you’d think the resulting images would be much more varied than the aesthetic from, say, your typical top-down big-brand designers. On the other hand, the type of designs that are most popular are… the type of designs that tend to be most popular… with the type of people who like that sort of thing… thereby attracting more like-minded people… If you see what I mean. I don’t necessarily agree with this guy’s tirade against crowd-sourcing, but it’s an interesting point.
But here’s the thing: Graphic tees are really all about personal style, so everyone’s bound to seek out something different. As I said, it’s all a matter of personal taste. So check out Threadless and see if something fits you.
The size is definitely right.
