We Asked a Savile Row Tailor to Test All the ‘Best’ T-Shirts You See in Social Media Ads

Bombarded by social media ads promising the “perfect” T-shirt whatever your shape, WIRED put these claims to the test with world-famous Savile Row tailors Gieves & Hawkes.

Photograph: Son of a Tailor; Rapanui; Sunspel; Getty Images; Alamy

Everyone has a favorite T-shirt. Recently most have coveted Jeremy Allen White’s from The Bear. For WIRED senior editor Jeremy Allen White, it’s one of his prized In-N-Out Burger designs—but lately, across his social media feeds, he’s been inundated by brands claiming he’s wrong and that they have unlocked the secret to creating The Perfect T-Shirt.

Some use heritage as a sales strategy, others target body insecurities, while a new breed of online fashion brands are turning to high-tech lasers and adaptive algorithms to create custom T-shirts, tailored to you. But which is best?

The 13 T-shirt brands tested have all claimed (primarily on social media) to make the perfect T-shirt, or words to that effect. Some, such as Spoke and Son of a Tailor, make shirts to order based on the findings of an online questionnaire, while Sanvt encourages customers to send in video clips to help its algorithm determine the perfect fit.

Obviously, fit is personal, and everybody is shaped differently, so to get the measure of each brand, Jeremy was joined by UK managing editor Mike Dent and contributing editor Chris Haslam, all of whom are different shapes and sizes and—crucially—have contrasting ideas around what makes the perfect T-shirt.