I've Been Slowly Replacing All of My T-Shirts With Comfort Colors
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I tend to buy T-shirts in bunches. Anytime I find a shirt I really like, I acquire at least a week's worth. In the era retroactively known as 'indie sleaze,' I was outfitted exclusively in American Apparel 50/25/25 tees. In the early Instagram era, I saw an ad for Buck Mason and bought a bunch of those. Then I decided I liked V-necks and switched to The Gap's tagless Jersey shirts, which had a nice soft feel and just the right depth of dip.
Last summer, I found my new fave at a chintzy tourist shop in Maine. It had the name of the town, Bar Harbor, printed on a butter-hued blank from a company called Comfort Colors. After a few wearings, I liked it so much I looked at the label to see what it was. I bought a second and have since been slowly replacing every T-shirt in my closet with shirts in the brand's various comforting colors. Photograph: Martin Cizmar Comfort Colors Heavyweight T-Shirt 1717
Comfort Colors isn't an emerging brand—it's owned by Gilden, which is about as interesting and sexy as being owned by Country Crock margarine. I am not the first person from a prominent review site to notice that Comfort Colors is the best in the biz, though I believe I am the first to do so without funding Maureen Dowd and Ross Douthat for a website still approvingly dubbing new products the 'Tesla of …' in 2025.
In any case, the Comfort Colors T-shirt—specifically the standard-issue 100 percent cotton model no. 1717—checks every box for me.
They're boxy but not too boxy. I have a few vintage Hanes Beefy T's, and Comfort Colors are far more fitted, with sleeves that stop an inch or so above the elbow instead of drooping down the forearm. They look a little boxier than they are because of the triple-stitched shoulders and double-stiched hemline and sleeves, which give the shirt an overbuilt look and feel. For a middle-aged person, this is a cut that says you know three Billie Eilish songs, but you're not trying to dress like her.
Comfort Colors tees are made with cotton from American farms, though it's spun up in Honduras. It's ring-spun, which gives it both softness and strength. These shirts are far more breathable than any blend, even though they're made from relatively hefty 6.1-ounce fabric. That means that one square yard of that fabric weighs 6.1 ounces, making it just a tad beefier (0.1 ounces per square yard) than either a Hanes Beefy T or a Uniqlo Supima cotton tee. Best of all, the American cotton ages beautifully. None of my half-dozen Comfort Colors shirts have shrunk, and they've all softened and faded just a touch with each whirl around the washing machine. Photograph: Martin Cizmar
The colors I like best—flo blue, butter, pepper, crimson—come with a lightly faded look thanks to a pigment dye process that uses less water and power than traditional dying. They have a broken-in vintage vibe right out of the bag, which I really appreciate. It's a tiny detail, and there is no objective reason to value it, but I also love that the tags are dyed the same color as the shirt.
Did I mention they're about $10 each? And they come in dozens of colors. And with pockets. They have sweatshirts too!
Comfort Colors is so great because you can build an entire closet of basics from their line without breaking the bank. And if you get tired of plain, there are options. The wide array of colors and a very reasonable price point means they're also popular with screenprinters. There's a cottage industry of Etsy sellers printing on them, with buyers like me presumably searching specifically for the brand. Our own Parker Hall prints T-shirts for his band on Comfort Colors blanks—I'll buy one if I can make it to one of his shows. And when I'm back in Maine this July, you can bet I'll be buying a bunch more—look for me in a 'THE MOOSE IS LOOSE' T-shirt with a design transparently ripping off the Life Is Good look, but somehow with an enhanced charge for cheuginess.
If you're a loyal WIRED reader, you may have seen that we recently updated a list of the best T-shirts among those T-shirts which claim they're the best T-shirts, which was compiled by our London-based team with input from a Saville Row tailor. I did request that they include Comfort Colors in their testing, though they naturally had no idea what a Col o r was. They politely declined because 'the brands have to claim they make the 'BEST, PERFECT' T-shirt' and 'Comfort Colors don't boast, sadly.'
They indeed do not boast, so I will do so in their stead. Comfort Colors makes the closest thing to a perfect T-shirt I've found. You can try one for about $10. If you're like me you may find yourself tossing a fresh color in with every few Amazon orders until your whole closet is full.
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'I wanted that life,' Tilghman recalls in the book. 8 Tilghman was initially a party girl, posting sexy snaps of nights out to Instagram. Lee Tilghman/ Instagram She stopped drinking and began exercising. One morning, after a run, she made a smoothie with avocado, banana, coconut and kale that was so thick, she couldn't drink it from a glass. She poured it into a bowl, sprinkled some seeds on top, and posted it on the 'gram. Advertisement The likes rolled in. She began posting these 'smoothie bowls' nearly every day, in every color of the rainbow, with a bounty of toppings arranged like works of art. The clothing brand Free People interviewed her about her culinary creations for its blog. 'I was like, 'Okay, this thing is popping off.'' Tilghman recalled. 'Every time I posted a smoothie bowl, my following would grow. The comments would be crazy. People had never seen them before.' She left NYC for LA, to chase Instagram stardom. The term 'influencer' had just begun bubbling, and savvy millennial brands had just started seeing pretty young women as inexpensive ambassadors for their products. 8 Then, after a cocaine bender, she changed her ways and focused on healthy content. She started posting images of colorful smoothie bowls that quickly took off. Lee Tilghman/ Instagram Tilghman went all-in. When a follower DMed her and told her that fluoride caused 'brain damage,' she stopped using toothpaste with it — and promptly developed six cavities. When her roommate told her that bananas had a ton of sugar, Tilghman cut them from her diet. (She still made her smoothie bowls with them, since the bananas helped make the liquid thick enough to hold all the toppings; she just threw it out after snapping a picture.) Tongue-scraping, dry-brushing, double-filtered charcoal water, body oiling, fasting: Tilghman tried it all. 'I did two twenty-one-day cleanses back-to-back,' she writes in her book. 'I got rid of gluten, dairy, soy, peanuts, and sugar. I paid [a Reiki-certified healer] the first half of an $8,000 coaching package, which included breathwork, moon circles, and unlimited text support.' The more she tried — and the realer she got, posting about her struggles with PCOS (a hormonal condition that can cause bloating and irregular periods) or her past struggled with anorexia — the more followers, and brand sponsorships, she got. And the more brand sponsorships she got, the more time she had to spend posting. And the more time she spent posting, the more time she spent on the app, and the more she hated herself. Advertisement 8 Soon, she was getting attention from brands and posting smoothie bowls daily. Lee Tilghman/ Instagram She would often take 200 photos before finding one where she looked thin enough to post on the grid — often with some caption about self-acceptance and self-love. Her self-absorption and food phobias eventually alienated her from the rest of the world. She was so terrified of gluten, of soy, of sugar that she couldn't go out to eat. She once dragged her mom all over Tokyo — during a sponsored trip — in search of a green apple, because the red ones in her hotel had too much sugar. She was so obsessed with getting the perfect Instagram photo that she couldn't have a conversation. Advertisement 'I put my health [and Instagram] above everything, including family and relationships,' she said. 'If your body is a temple and you treat it super well and you eat all the right foods and do all the things, but you don't have anyone close to you because you're trying to control your life so much, it's a dark place.' 8 She left NYC for LA to pursue wellness influencing. Lee Tilghman/ Instagram It all came crashing in 2018, after she announced she was hosting a wellness workshop — and charging $350 for the cheapest was accused of white privilege, and her apology post only elicited more scorn. Some sponsors pulled out. Shortly after, her apartment flooded. She looked around and noticed that with the exception of her dog, Samson, every single thing in her place — including her toothbrush — had been gifted by brands looking for promotion. Advertisement 'I was a prop too—a disposable, soulless, increasingly emaciated mannequin used by companies to sell more stuff,' she writes. 'We all were—all the billions of us who thought we were using Instagram when really it was the other way around.' 8 Followers loved her fitness content, but behind the scenes, Tilghman was struggling. Lee Tilghman/ Instagram 8 One day, she realized that every item in her apartment, save for her dog, had been gifted by a brand. Lee Tilghman/ Instagram In 2019, she got rid of it all, deleted Instagram and went to a six-week intensive treatment center for her disordered eating. There, she had to throw out all her adaptogens and supplemental powders. Advertisement 'I felt like an addict when they're so done with their drug of choice that they can't wait to throw it away,' she recalled of her first day without the app. 'It was amazing.' Though she did admit that she couldn't stop taking selfies. 'I would be at a red light and just take 15 selfies — it was weird!' During the pandemic, she moved back to New York and did social media for a couple companies, including a tech and a perfume brand. She sporadically updated her Instagram in 2021, but really came back in earnest this past year, to do promotion for her memoir. 'I've been gone for so long that I have this newfound creativity and appreciation for it,' she said of her new, goofy online persona. 'The whimsy is back.' She also has a Substack, Offline Time, and has just moved to Brooklyn Heights with Samson and her fiance, Jack, who works in finance. 8 Tilghman is no longer an influencer, though she has used Instagram to promote her new book. And, she says, she would consider doing sponsored posts in the future. Olga Ginzburg for N.Y. Post She says that her book feels even more timely now than when she started working on it four years ago. Despite all she's been through, she doesn't rule out influencing completely. 'I mean, listen, living is expensive,' she said. 'I'm not opposed doing a sponsored post in the future. I actually said that to my audience, a couple months ago. I was like, 'Guys, I know I just wrote a book about not influencing anymore. But, rent be renting.''
