This makes sense in the modern age where retailers accept returns for any/no reason and manufacturers tend to bend over backwards to get you to avoid returning anything.

Same reason why any furniture you order online seems to always have all the tools necessary to assemble it. They never require power tools and always include screwdriver(s) and/or Allen wrenches. They need to design away every possible reason someone might just return it.

Still happens sometimes, especially if you do warmer water.

I have some semi-recent pinkified cloths.

That said, washing everything on cold water and low temps in the dryer works pretty well at extending the life of cloths.

Not buying fast fashion helps with the color fastness. There was the article sometime back about one of the popular depeche mode sites with "swimming attire" vs swimsuits as they were not meant to get wet and the colors would run down your skin if you got them wet.

I should have been clear, I also expected that there were changes to the clothes. I was just more surprised after we ran some sweaters through the cycle on accident, only to find that they did just fine.

They are fully synthetic, so may not suit you, and the brand is fishing/outdoors oriented, but Southern Marsh makes very comfortable T shirts that feature 30 UPF in their “performance shirt” lines. Have seen no shrinkage and the arms are long.

As a pale guy whose wife likes the beach, they have been very helpful.

EDIT: I'm sure they are nowhere near the only brand to use that particular mix of fibers (mostly a variety of polyester/Spandex mixes depending on the shirt), just the one whose shirts I own. And the "fishing" bit is about the designs - very heavy on the fishing/hunting designs.

I have a kitchenaid dryer from the 80's with multiple selections for dryness levels and it works great every time. I can leave the clothes a little moist if the air is dry and I'm going to hang them immediately or set them to completely dry, in case I'm going to be away when they are ready.

My parents' modern dryer is awful, just like yours. The craziest part is that it starts a countdown timer when there's tens of minutes left, as though the designers new the sensor was awful and decided to add some extra drying time to cover it up.

I think ours is an LG. Could be something faulty with the sensor in yours, if it is still newish, worth a support call to them to see if they can fix it.

I say it's the dryer too, more than the washer for a lot of fabrics.

You just have to figure with all that dryer lint after every single load that your items certainly aren't getting any bigger after giving off all those grams of fiber.

You can only imagine whether or not more or less fiber than that is being lost down the drain with your wash water each time.

I was about to write this. Heat pump dryers take a little longer, but they are so much gentler on clothes.

I had that issue but as it turns out I was just getting fatter

If you have 100% cotton garments you want to get more longevity out of, washing on cold water + letting them air dry is the way to go (although sticking stuff in the dryer for ~5 minutes on the lowest possible setting before putting it on a hanger is fine to help fluff out any wrinkles). This also goes for anything "nice" that you want to keep in the best possible shape, even if it's not 100% cotton--don't forget that dryer lint is partly the result of your clothes' fabric sloughing off, which is why some shirts get paper-thin if you own them long enough!

I wear a lot of 100% cotton (including 100% linen) shirts that still look and fit almost like new, since I'm a stickler about laundering them this way. Towels, on the other hand, get maximum heat for both washing and drying, and you can really see the difference. I use a lot of 100% cotton washcloths from those Target multipacks, and recently bought a set identical to one I'd bought a year or two prior; the new one was larger, a little softer, and a much brighter color. The old one had shrunk to a pale, slightly scratchy ghost of its former self!

On exactly one occasion, I accidentally threw a 100% cotton shirt in the towel hamper and didn't catch it before starting the load. It's not a shirt so much as a crop top now :)

Ha. I modified my Whirlpool dryer with an Arduino-based automation because its own internal sensor is not precise. I used this nice sensor: https://www.adafruit.com/product/4099

I tend to find that older (10+ years) t-shirts shrink a lot. Even if I don't wash them.

Even cheap band t-shirts don't shrink in our dryer. I have sweaters that I am confident would have shrunk in the past, but do just fine here.

On that last, I almost forgot I had direct evidence. We visited a place that shrank some of our clothes that we had washed many times back home.

Unless the load is very small this doesn't really do much - water evaporates and uses however much heat the dryer can put out. It is only near the end of the cycle where this can make a difference in most cases.

I had thought this was the main driver, but we washed some of our nicer clothes and they came out just fine. I have a cashmere sweater we accidentally sent through the cycle that didn't shrink.

I see the same. Usually with synthetic fibers.