The War Over Non-Iron Shirts

Some guys despise non-iron shirts, dismissing them as stiff and uncomfortable. Others swear by the convenience and defend them to their last thread. Can’t we all just get along? A product of the Eisenhower era, a period that also spawned nonstick fry pans and frozen TV dinners, non-iron shirts debuted at Brooks Brothers in 1953. Menswear historian and author Bruce Boyer noted that chemicals conglomerate DuPont worked with the menswear retailer to launch the first generation of Dacron-and-cotton shirts. Since then the non-iron formula hasn’t changed much, other than the fact that most are all-cotton shirts rather than blends: The anti-wrinkle properties are derived from a chemical treatment that releases formaldehyde and bonds the strands of cotton fibers to create a stiffer fabric less likely to wrinkle. Read more at The Wall Street Journal.