As far as I’m concerned, the greatest development ever in post-space-age fabrics may be the 95%/5% cotton/spandex blend. It feels a lot like cotton, only more comfortably stretchy and cooler. Good stuff, and it makes for a very comfortable undershirt.
My stepfather and I discovered one particularly nice instantiation of the cotton/spandex undershirt a year or two ago and started buying them regularly. Now that I’m working an office job and need more T-shirts that can go under a dress shirt, I decided it was a good time to go looking for more of them. The hunt was strangely difficult. (I tried on a similar blend from another maker, but the fit was awful—it was a bodybuilder shirt, cut large in the torso to accomodate rippling pecs and slender below to show off washboard abs. It was also made for someone six-foot-six, despite being a “medium.”)
Some futher hunting turned up a few of them in a sale bin at about half price. Of course, we snapped them up immediately. A friendly salesman told us that there were no more in stock, but he helpfully went into the computer system and found for us all the extant shirts of that make in every store in the department chain. They were all at the same absurdly deep 70% discount.
Our best guess is that the line is being discontinued and the department stores are pushing the remaining inventory out the door. We’re going to call up a few more stores to snap up bargain-priced shirts if that really is the case, because we might not ever get another shot at more. From then on out, we’d need to ration the shirts.
We could wind up like Elaine. Is today shirt-worthy?