The Best T-Shirt I Ever Bought Came From a Midwest Strip Mall. I Tracked It Down on Amazon. | Reviews by Wirecutter

By Alexander Aciman

Alexander Aciman is an editor who has written about pasta-making, running gear, and Wirecutter picks he has spotted on TV shows.

I was in the prime of my turbo-packing era when I finally made a bone-headed mistake. Turbo-packing, for the uninitiated, is the act of packing hastily and haphazardly at an hour irresponsibly close to the moment when you are meant to leave for the airport, often without properly folding your clothes, sometimes without even making sure that they are clean.

It’s usually done when traveling to a familiar place where all the small comforts of the world are already waiting for you. It does not matter if you forget this or that. Turbo-packing is an act of abandoning all caution and leaning into ease.

In this case, I was visiting my grandparents. And what I forgot was T-shirts.

Yes, I forgot to pack an entire category of clothing.

Not long after my arrival, I bought an emergency T-shirt from a local frozen-custard shop to get me through the trip. I could throw it in with the nightly wash cycle and alternate with the shirt I’d worn on the plane. It would be fine, I told myself.

One does not look at a faded, pale red T-shirt purchased for roughly $15 from a strip mall in Wisconsin and think, “This is possibly the greatest T-shirt known to man.” The thought is inconceivable, bordering on the absurd. In fact, your immediate assumption is more likely that this will probably be the worst shirt ever.

But the moment I put it on, all disillusion was shed away, and I was struck, momentarily, by the feeling of a lush, almost buttery cotton draped over my shoulders.

I looked at the tag and saw that the shirt was manufactured by a brand called Comfort Colors—a popular choice among screen printers for its thick and soft fabric, relaxed fit, and sturdy construction. With a cursory Google search, I discovered that blank versions of the exact shirt I had purchased—the Comfort Colors 1717 Adult Heavyweight Tee—were available on Amazon in a veritable armada of colors for around $10 each.

I bought a dozen.

These short-sleeve T-shirts have a slightly relaxed fit, are available up to size 4XL, and come in more than 30 colors.

As someone who has spent a frankly embarrassing number of hours tugging at fabrics, inspecting seams, and learning from relatives who worked in textiles, I was impressed by how premium this shirt felt, especially for the price.

The fact that scratchy Hanes and Gildan T-shirts with see-through fabric can be purchased for roughly the same $10 made me feel like I was getting away with something. (Though we haven’t directly compared the Comfort Colors tees with our picks for the best white tees for men, we did indeed dismiss an option from Gildan and other similarly priced shirts for being sheer and thin, among other quality issues.)

Good clothes should not be this easy to purchase or this affordable. This was the T-shirt heist of the century.

The price feels almost liberating; the times I’ve been foolish enough to invest in expensive T-shirts from cool brands like Lady White Co. or Merz B. Schwanen (which are about $100), I have been hesitant to wear them liberally (or I end up spilling iced coffee on them within the hour). Comfort Colors shirts have that slight glint of luxury with their relaxed fit and hefty fabric, but part of their charm is their cheapness. It allows you to wear it without reservation. A replacement is but a click away.

Fabrics are usually measured in ounces per square yard. The heavier the fabric, the thicker or denser it is. A standard similarly priced T-shirt’s fabric usually teeters at just over 4 ounces. The Comfort Colors 1717 tee clocks in at a beefy 6.1 ounces. The fabric has an impressive density and weight, which helps the shirt keep its shape throughout the day.

And yet, while thickness can sometimes mean a stiffer fabric (think back to all those heavy, rigid gym T-shirts from high school), I’ve found the opposite is true in this case. What made me fall in love with this shirt is its almost paradoxical softness. It is heavy and delicate at the same time.

Comfort Colors uses ring-spun cotton, which produces longer and smoother yarns. The fabric has a plush, almost lofty texture, and the shirt itself ripples in gentle waves rather than in hard creases like so many cheap shirts. During my week of wearing only that original red shirt, I found myself repeatedly running my fingertips across the fabric.

I particularly love that these shirts are garment-dyed, which imparts a prewashed, almost aged softness that makes them feel like well-worn vintage items rather than brand-new shirts. It also gives the color a pleasantly sun-faded appearance. My favorite color is pepper, which is a blend of charcoal beneath a beautifully ebbing black with hints of pale blue-green.

But the shirt’s greatest achievement lies in its fit. As a man who stands at 5-foot-6, T-shirts have always been a point of difficulty for me. Comfort Colors shirts have a relaxed cut without being overly boxy or baggy.

The dropped shoulder seams let the garment sit square on my body, and the weight of the fabric gives it a drape that thinner T-shirts are gravitationally incapable of pulling off. It’s a drape that makes you look—and feel—at ease. It also doesn’t have any side seams, which makes them wear more comfortably. These are the shirts I want to wear on my longest days.

A $10 T-shirt is not without its issues, however. I’ve experienced some variations across batches and received shirts an inch or so longer than the previous one, or wider, or narrower. The collar band has also changed from year to year, with some being wider or skinnier, or sitting higher on the neck than others.

But, for me, these fluctuations are forgivable at the price, and are the type of sins easily washed out by a trip through a washing machine.

I’ve also experienced stock issues and have noticed that some colors disappear for months at a time—sometimes they never return at all. With Comfort Colors, it is best to never get too attached to a single color, or, alternatively, to stockpile it.

I am not really someone who wears red, or much of any color, for that matter. Nor am I someone who has a collection of different T-shirts from every city I visit.

If anything, my wardrobe is more akin to the uniform of a cartoon character. New things are rarely introduced, and when I find something I like, it gets incorporated into the uniform, canonized like an amendment in the Bill of Rights.

It is not often that a single garment can change the way you think of dressing yourself, but of all the shirts I’d found and fallen in love with over the years, the red custard-shop T-shirt quickly became my favorite—a lone and bizarre outlier in a wardrobe of grays and navys and blacks, until I lost it on another vacation years later.

Out of curiosity, I went back to the same shop recently and found that it no longer used Comfort Colors for its shirts. Of course, you can never have another first frozen-custard emergency T-shirt, but luckily, in this case, I was able to go online and buy several more just like it.

This article was edited by Hannah Rimm and Catherine Kast.

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Alexander Aciman

Alexander Aciman is an editor. He has worked as a journalist and on documentary film projects, and he has also worked as a screenwriter for Amazon and Lionsgate. When he’s not working, you can probably find him bird watching, running, or making pasta.