You’re probably going to shrink with age, and your tee might, too

Royal Apparel says its tees can shrink 5 to 7 percent, or even 8 or 9 percent for some organic cottons.

It’s a funny thing about life. The longer you live, the shorter you get.

Most people will shrink one or two inches as they age, mostly because the shock absorbers (discs) between the vertebrae in our spines narrow over time.

Between ages 30 and 70, men lose about an inch in height while women shrink by two inches.

It’s almost as if our tees know this, as they can shrink, too.

“Any alteration, even washing and drying — it can change sizing,” according to the customer service department at Royal Apparel, the New York company from which we buy all of our blank shirts.

Pre-shrunk can still shrink

When we started in 2017, we used Royal’s 17051-style, 50/50 heather blend tees. Cotton-polyester blends are less likely to shrink than all-cotton tees.

But partly because I prefer all-cotton and also because we had some issues with the way the heather tees responded to heat during the printing process, we switched to Royal’s all-cotton 5051-style blanks.

And in 2024, we started using Royal’s pigment-dyed blanks for several designs. These 5151PD-style tees are all-cotton, too, but the coloring process is different than for the 5051s.

With the 5051s, the fabric is dyed and then cut and sewn into shirts. The pigment-dyed shirts are cut and sewn and then colored.

Unlike the 5051s, the pigment-dyed shirts are pre-shrunk.

That doesn’t mean that pre-shrunk shirts can’t shrink further, just maybe less than shirts that aren’t pre-shrunk.

Customers often ask us whether our tees will shrink. Our standard response is that we wear them all the time and rarely see any significant change.

Royal suggests that a shirt can shrink 5 to 7 percent (or even 8 or 9 percent for some special organic cottons).

I dry on moderate heat or air dry. The latter is helpful, too, for preserving screen printing on shirts, as repeated exposure to heat can contribute to traditional plastisol ink cracking.

As for height loss, a healthy diet and exercise will help mitigate that. Good posture will help, too, reducing stress on your vertebrae.

So stand tall and show off that Stay tee!