Every stretch shirt wins the changing room. Put two shirts on a customer, one with two per cent elastane and one without, and the stretch one wins nearly every time. It moves with you, it does not pull at the shoulder, and it feels forgiving after lunch.
We used it in the first two volumes for exactly that reason. We have taken it out of all woven shirting, and here is what changed our minds.
The wear trials
We put eighteen shirts, nine with elastane and nine without, through a year with staff and a few patient customers. Same fabric base, same construction, same laundering instructions. We looked at them at six months and at twelve.
At six months there was no meaningful difference. At twelve there was. Seven of the nine elastane shirts had visible bagging at the elbow that did not recover after washing. Two had a wavy distortion along the placket where the interlining and the stretch face had moved at different rates. None of the nine without had either problem.
Why it happens
Elastane recovers well for a while and then it does not. Heat accelerates it, and everything about how clothes are actually treated involves heat: a warm wash, a tumble dryer, an iron, a car in May. Once the elastane in a spot has fatigued, the cotton around it has nothing holding it back, and the area stays stretched.
It is worst at the elbow and the seat because those are the places that get repeatedly flexed while warm. It is a slow failure, so people tend to conclude the shirt “went out of shape” rather than identifying the cause.
The recycling problem
There is a second reason, less immediate. A cotton shirt at end of life can be mechanically recycled or, at worst, composted. A cotton-elastane blend can be neither. The elastane cannot be separated at any sensible cost, and it contaminates the cotton stream. Two per cent by weight is enough to make the whole garment unrecyclable.
What replaces it
Cut, mostly. Most of what stretch was compensating for was a shoulder and armhole that did not fit properly. Raising the armhole and reshaping the sleeve head gets you most of the movement back, permanently, with no fabric trick involved. We also moved to a softer finish on the twill, which reads as give in the hand without any elastic in the yarn.
Knitwear and the jersey pieces are a different argument and still contain a small amount of elastane where the construction depends on it. Woven shirting does not, and will not again.