Monday 2 February 2015

T-shirt fitting guide

For the most part, a tshirt looks cheap and makes you look generic; it is one of the most basic piece of clothing for most of us. It’s not something you would wear to stand out at a bar, but I’m here to tell you how you could because when I walk around and observe people, I can safely say that 3/4 of the people don’t wear it right . The key is in the fit.
Start with shoulders. *The seam that divides the short sleeve with the body of the tshirt should rest right at the corner of the shoulder, so that it makes your shoulder/upper arm pop out just slightly into the sleeve so that it gives the impression of wide shoulders or accentuate your already wide shoulders.
 

*This 
might be a bit too tight. This 
, this 
and this 
are perfect. When you wear your tshirt and it looks like this 
, then the shoulder length of the shirt are too big. This latter picture is what I see most people do because well, it’s comfortable, don’t have to risk buying a tshirt that’s too small and they probably don’t really care about what they look like, but you do, since you are here reading MFA. :)
Next is the sleeve length. The short sleeve should stop somewhere in between the middle third area of your upper arm. My rule of thumb is that the sleeve should stop somewhere close to the middle of the upper arm. Depending on what kind of look you are going for, you have some degrees of freedom here. If you sleeve covers only one third, then you want to make sure you’re going for the skinny tight look. If your sleeve covers two third of the upper arm, you can go for looser clothing (but make sure it’s not oversized!!). Again, in pictures: rule of thumb 
, loose 
,too big 
. If you followed the shoulder advice, this shouldn’t be a problem. EDIT: Have to add this however for people with skinny arms: the sleeve should hug around your biceps at the most. You don’t want the sleeve to extend out of your arm too much and make you look skinnier than you already are. I go by the two finger rule of thumb where the sleeve should be tight around your arm with two fingers.
Next is the tshirt length. Whether you wear your jeans low rise or not, the tshirt should always stop or cover at least half of your belt to at most half of your zipper. In pictures, here’s the upper limit 
and here’s the lower limit 
. Anything less or more just looks weird.
Lastly is the waist size and this is really the final touch in making your tshirt look nice on you. Just like shirts, most mass produced tshirt are made for the largest common denominator, so for most of us that all fit or skinny, most tshirts are just loose in the waist area. However, if you sport the beer belly, best not to get a tight or fitted tshirt because that would just accentuate your condition. The fabric should just softly hug around your body. So, this is fitted 
this is tight fitted 
and this is loose fitted 
.
To test out if you’re doing it right, try putting on a white tshirt and look in the mirror. The white tshirt is a very basic attire that most people use as an undershirt so it’s unusual to nicely stand out with it solely because of the inherent properties of that piece of clothing. If you look nice in a white tshirt, then the size of the tshirt is what you’re going to look for in other tshirts. Your whole tshirt shouldn’t have any stretch lines anywhere or it will be too tight and conversely, you shouldn’t have loose ripples either or it’s just too big.
So now you know how you tshirt should fit or you already knew and you probably came here to ask, well, where can I get those nice tshirts? For the skinny man, I suggest American Apparel. Their target market is the skinny white art student and their tshirts are top quality, but overpriced if you buy them at their outlets. You can buy them for cheap in packs of 6 and the likes on eBay. For the regular, stores like Zara, H&M, J.Crew, Banana Republic and even Old Navy offer pretty good stuff. At least those are the ones that I find are good; feel free to add your favourite brands and stores. Just be wary of tshirts from no name brands at Walmart and the like.

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