There have been changes in the manufacturing process to "pre-shrink" fabrics.

Similar improvements have been made to improve colorfastness. Mixing new reds and whites used to consistently produce pink. Not anymore.

This makes sense in the modern age where retailers accept returns for any/no reason and manufacturers tend to bend over backwards to get you to avoid returning anything.

Same reason why any furniture you order online seems to always have all the tools necessary to assemble it. They never require power tools and always include screwdriver(s) and/or Allen wrenches. They need to design away every possible reason someone might just return it.

I was actually spoiled by the fact that self-assembled furniture typically does not require any power tools. Then I bought a bike rack and was disappointed that the first step required a drill.

Still happens sometimes, especially if you do warmer water.

I have some semi-recent pinkified cloths.

That said, washing everything on cold water and low temps in the dryer works pretty well at extending the life of cloths.

Not buying fast fashion helps with the color fastness. There was the article sometime back about one of the popular depeche mode sites with "swimming attire" vs swimsuits as they were not meant to get wet and the colors would run down your skin if you got them wet.

That's a weird topic for an 80s band fan site, but ok.

did you ever ask yourself what the name of the band meant?

Better not to ask. :P

Pretty soon you find out Frankie wasn't even in the band; The Pet Shop Boys didn't sell dog food at all; Dexy has terrible lap times; the Elfmans weren't actually knighted; etc.

I should have been clear, I also expected that there were changes to the clothes. I was just more surprised after we ran some sweaters through the cycle on accident, only to find that they did just fine.

I wish I lived in your world. It is very rare I find a long-sleeved garment whose sleeves are long enough, and it usually only takes a wash or two for them to become too short :(

They are fully synthetic, so may not suit you, and the brand is fishing/outdoors oriented, but Southern Marsh makes very comfortable T shirts that feature 30 UPF in their “performance shirt” lines. Have seen no shrinkage and the arms are long.

As a pale guy whose wife likes the beach, they have been very helpful.

EDIT: I'm sure they are nowhere near the only brand to use that particular mix of fibers (mostly a variety of polyester/Spandex mixes depending on the shirt), just the one whose shirts I own. And the "fishing" bit is about the designs - very heavy on the fishing/hunting designs.

I've had the opposite problem where I hadn't had shrinking issues in years until I got a new LG dryer with one of those auto sensing modes that it defaults to. The "smart" feature is terrible. I had a number of shirts shrink on me because it sometimes goes absurdly overboard with the drying.

Once we figured out the problem and stopped using all of the smart features it started working fine. Unfortunately the interface really wants you to use the fancy modes and requires an annoying amount of steps to manually set a drying run. Easily the worst dryer UX I've ever had. I doubt I'll buy another LG appliance, although there are probably plenty of other offenders these days.

I have a kitchenaid dryer from the 80's with multiple selections for dryness levels and it works great every time. I can leave the clothes a little moist if the air is dry and I'm going to hang them immediately or set them to completely dry, in case I'm going to be away when they are ready.

My parents' modern dryer is awful, just like yours. The craziest part is that it starts a countdown timer when there's tens of minutes left, as though the designers new the sensor was awful and decided to add some extra drying time to cover it up.

I 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

Lol, this happened to me the first time I started gaining weight in my early 30's.

As silly as this sounds, the same thing happened to me. I was getting pretty frustrated because all of my pants kept shrinking.. the truth hurt.

Your pain is shared, brother. Or sister.

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 :)

> 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

Just hang it without wrinkles and it will be perfect when it's dry. When air drying, I don't hang shirts by their shoulders or pants by the belt end, I fold them over the hanger (or drying rack bar) at their midpoints. Adjust a little to get out most wrinkles, and they are beautiful and unwrinkled when dry.

Linen typically means flax fibers.

Oh, huh, TIL. I always thought it was a different way of processing cotton... but I just checked my closet and it looks like some of my stuff is a cotton/linen blend, which might be partly why I was confused. And would explain why some items wrinkle worse than others :P

In any case, both cotton and linen get the cold-water treatment from me!

I think a lot of things use pre-shrunk fabric these days. I've got t-shirts that haven't shrunk, and t-shirts that have. Unfortunately a lot of band shirts bought at concerts fall into the latter :(.

I tend to find that older (10+ years) t-shirts shrink a lot. Even if I don't wash them.

Same happens to me, but I don't think it's the T-shirts that are shrinking.

It's weird, I never had that problem yet suddenly my old clothes started shrinking a couple years ago too.

Might have been our new hangers.

I literally have a t-shirt from 1997 that doesn't shrink in our machines. :D

I think you may not have fully appreciated the comment you replied to

I was just offering the amusing anecdote that I have a 30 year old shirt that doesn't shrink. I used to treat it with kids gloves to keep it from doing so.

Note that I fully understand it for the anecdotal weight that it has. That is, basically none. Is fun for conversation, but isn't intended to prove anything.

Earlier commenter was talking about getting fatter as they age. Not actual cloths shrinkage.

Ha! Ok, yeah, I definitely missed that aspect of the joke. :D

> Note that I fully understand it for the anecdotal weight that it has.

At this point I thought you were going for an ahem heavy-handed joke.

I can only wish I was that comically gifted. :D

That’s not who they were replying to.

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.

Warm vs cold water usage,

dryer settings,

local environment in the laundry room.

Probably in that order.

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.

The whole point is that the amount of heat the dryer puts out goes to zero/very low amount for a period of time. So the evaporation stops and the cloth I guess has some time to make smaller adjustments? Then the heat resumes. I don't understand why it works, but I do know modern dryers do it.

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

Mine has metal contacts in the back of the drum, which I presume measures resistance, similar to how this soil moisture sensor works: https://www.adafruit.com/product/6362

I'll never understand how modern designs work worse, despite access to better sensors.

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.