After your sweatshirt is named “the greatest hoodie ever made,” expectations are pretty high when you decide to make a T-shirt.
For an entire year, Michelle Allen, American Giant‘s director of design and merchandising, has been sampling hundreds of fabrics in the hope of creating the perfect T-shirt. She’s been rifling through materials, draping cloth, and designing prototypes—which she then tested on dozens of subjects. “She told me that she was staking her entire career on this T-shirt,” says Bayard Winthrop, the company’s founder and CEO.
