tl;dr; you can't, cause the fibers are crinckled up in a lower energy state, but try soaking in 1 tablespoon of hair conditioner per liter of lukewarm water and stretch.

Just buy them slightly oversize and let them shrink down to the right size.

I have the following printout in the laundry room. I haven't had any problems with shrinking or fading, etc.

https://www.ihateironing.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/07...

It has been ages since I had clothes shrink on me. To the point that I had assumed something must have gotten better in modern dryers. Is that not the case?

Edit: Quickly searching, this appears to be the case? Specifically modern moisture sensing dryers that stop appropriately goes a long way to never having something shrink on you.

Me and the wife have so many discussions about this :)

We have a lot of "shrinkage" in our house, that I am convinced is more due to both of us uhh "growing" rather than the clothes shrinking ;)

You can imagine, it's a delicate subject

I am tall enough that shrinking t-shirts is a constant annoyance! (though I have to admit I haven't ever tried the 'conditioner and water' trick, even though I've heard of it before).

Low temperature washes and avoiding tumble dryers works. I've also noticed thicker material t-shirts seem to definitely shrink a lot less! Much thinner cottton t-shirts seem to shrink a lot more, my mental model is that there's less material so when it bunches together to it's "happy place", it ends up a lot smaller. I have no evidence for this though.

Any other tips from people here? Also, has anyone actually tried stretching with hair conditioner?

I had the opposite problem recently. Where Levi's jeans expanded and loosened up after a couple of washes. What's the reason for that?

My eye hit the "It’s not just hot water – here’s why" as one of the first things... em-dash, here's why... I smell the smelly smell, even though I'm not even opposed to it haha.

Day 39585 of HN not knowing anything about selvedge denim, or other nice quality men’s fashion…

Team no dryer. I have been cold wash + line-drying for my whole adult life; works out. (Unless something is actually soiled; then hot)

I'm down to just a few sweat shirts and over shirts from the 80s, but they are hanging in there. Both the colors and the fabric. When the subject comes up with friends who ask about a particular shirt I joke, "The cotton was tougher back then". Recently, I've had jeans, shirts, and even socks that didn't make it through a single summer.

Is anyone else freaked out about cleaning their dryer's lint filter given all the new fabric materials? I'm putting together a dryer-vac system to keep it from billowing into the air of our small laundry room.

Her logic seems reasonable but stating that the fibers "return to their original crinkled state" is missing the fact that rayon is also made from cellulose, cellulose II. While Cellulose I(natural) is metastable it can be converted by disolving in lye to a stable form (beta-gllocouse molecolue chain goes from being parallel to being anti parllel which increases the # of hydrogen bonds as well as helping create a more stable 3d structure)

This improve tensile strength much like what happens to fiber when they go through the process of spinning (as well as the options of making an infinite yarn from finite fibers by twisting them together) but on a different scale. regardless to return to original "crinckled state" they need to overcome those forces as well as the forces of the geometry of the knit.