T-shirts can be one of those items a bit like caps – incredibly hard to find one that is just right.
Not too baggy, not too slim, nice collar, soft but not too soft, not cardboard feeling, but also not see-through. What I’m trying to say here is there’s a great deal of elements at play when buying a T-shirt – you’d think as you wear one every day it should be an easy task, the truth is, it’s anything but.
I once found the perfect plain white T-shirt in a charity shop, it was an old Marks & Spencer one when their clothing went under the name St Michael, all of the aforementioned criteria was executed perfectly. I loved that T-shirt. For the short period of time I had it before it got lost.
Since then I’ve been combing eBay and Vinted for the same shirt, but to no avail. I’ve pretty much given up the hunt now, and in my process of doing so, I’ve managed to lose myself down the ‘Perfect White T-Shirt’ rabbit hole – spending many a late night Googling proper nerdy stuff like what the perfect GSM and collar thickness should be. It all got a bit ‘Let’s see Paul Allen’s business card’ if I’m being quite honest.
In doing this, one name that keeps coming up across semi-questionable menswear Reddit forums and hyper-niche YouTube videos is Standard & Strange and their Wakayama Loopwheel T-shirts.
Standard & Strange is an independent retailer, and one of the products they stock are T-shirts made in partnership with a Japanese fabric mill in Wakayama, who specialize in crafting cotton products. But when I say bespoke that’s not because they’ve worked some mumbo-jumbo-clothing-jargon into their product descriptions.
The reason they’re bespoke is because they utilize a method of spinning cotton that has been more or less abandoned in the modern day. If you were to walk into the fabric mill in Wakayama you wouldn’t be greeted by modern industrial fabric knitting machines, but instead vintage loopwheel machines.
I know what you’re thinking – big deal, they use old technology, it’s probably just a hipster way of not replacing outdated equipment.
But it’s not.
Vintage loopwheel machines knit around half a roll of fabric in one day, at around one meter per hour. In comparison a modern knitting machine operates at roughly ten times the speed, this makes modern cotton products contain a whole host of inconsistencies as the machine is ultimately operating faster than it should be.
Although vintage loopwheel machines are far slower, the gravity-fed nature of the knit applies minimal tension, meaning you receive a light, airy, remarkably soft and built-to-last final product. It’s kind of like when you make pancakes at home compared to the ones you get out and about. Okay, maybe that’s a bad analogy – most of the pancakes I make at home end up on the floor/ceiling.
But the point is, these are up there with the T-shirts that money can buy, and they don’t just come in white, but a whole host of other lovely colours – bright oranges, deep blues and punchy greens. Alright, they’re expensive, but at least with these products you can actually understand where your extra buck is going.
They don’t just make T-shirts though, but an array of lovely socks and hats also. In a world where mass consumption is so easy, trying to abide by the ‘buy less frequently but spend a bit more when doing so’ mantra is something everyone should do more. Ultimately – spend more on products when buying them, but buy them less frequently, in the hope that they’ll last longer and fewer products go to waste.
In my eyes, not many products fit this mantra more than T-shirts made by Wakayama Loopwheel.
So if you fancy purchasing one of these lifechanging T-shirts, head over to Standard and Strange.