The Best Workout Gear Is a Cotton Tee

In the ’90s, innovations in athletic wear went mainstream and put every weekend warrior under a deep spell. These new technical fabrics promised to wick away sweat and make you a better athlete. Sometime during the Obama administration what was initially designed for function became publicly acceptable at the airport and the grocery store. Now, these stretchy slate fabrics are the minimalist uniform and fashion’s worst enemy: athleisure.Enough is enough. We have spent too much time wrapped in the death grip of purportedly functional fabrics. All along, there has been a natural alternative to the soulless, synthetic shirts lining the racks at Dick’s Sporting Goods, and it’s something you probably already have: an old-fashioned 100% all-natural cotton tee.When I was a high school cross-country runner in the late ’90s and early aughts, all we ever ran in were cotton T-shirts. Ratty Blink-182 shirts, team-issued tees, local radio giveaways. But techy fabrics, with their trademarked names and proprietary blends of polyester, nylon, and spandex, had just muscled their way into every mall in America. Nike rolled out Dri-Fit in 1991. Under Armour was founded in 1996 by a former college football player who couldn’t stand his sweat-logged cotton practice shirts. By the early 2000s, these new shirts had trickled down from elite athletes to the average gymgoer, and cotton—long the preferred and classic workout tee—was suddenly considered passé, a performance liability. "Cotton is rotten, brother!" the guy at the local bike shop in the northern Michigan town where I grew up told me, warning that it would weigh me down with the puddles of sweat it soaks up.I admit I listened. Like any impressionable young man, marketing and trends got the best of me: I converted to the inescapable gospel of lightweight athletic fabrics sometime in 2003. I wore a bright blue polypropylene shirt to trot along the shores of Lake Michigan. And I continued my commitment to the trend when I arrived in New York in 2007, a lanky midwestern 20something running through the streets of the East Village in a hideous neon blend of polyester and nylon. I didn’t stop there. Reader: I was once arrested while running in Prospect Park after dark—long story—gorped out in a $120 hi-vis Saucony long-sleeve.The thing is, I never really liked these fabrics. The synthetic blends always felt stiff and scratchy on my skin. They would hold a stench after a half dozen wears, no matter how long I soaked them in distilled vinegar. On long runs, they made my nipples bleed! Yet I wore them dutifully for two decades for the dumbest reason: Because that was what you’re supposed to workout in. That’s what everyone wore. The soft-focus ads and peer pressure worked.Three years ago, I ditched synthetic fabrics cold turkey. The main reason was vanity: All my running shirts looked dorky. Modern race T-shirt aesthetics are best described as “AI-generated images of a bridge brought to you by a global financial services company.” The neutral workout gear in my drawers—drab grays with reflective piping—had all the charm of a surveillance drone. Meanwhile, my Instagram algorithm was filled with incredible vintage running photos. There’s New York City Marathon founder Fred Lebow in a ringer tee. Bill Clinton and Al Gore chopping it up sweat-soaked on the campaign trail in 1992 carrying McDonald’s cups. Bill Rodgers winning his first of four Boston Marathons in 1975. They were all wearing cotton. They all looked fantastic.LITTLE ROCK, AR - JULY 10: Democratic Presidential Candidate Gov. Bill Clinton (R) responds to a supporter as he and his new vice presidential candidate, Sen. Albert Gore of Tennessee, walk back to the Governor's mansion July 10, 1992 after a morning jog in Little Rock, Arkansas. (Photo credit should read TIM CLARY/AFP via Getty Images)TIM CLARY/Getty ImagesSo, one muggy day in May, I grabbed an old Detroit Tigers T-shirt and went running. I smelled like Old Spice and could feel the breeze passing through the Rorschach tests of sweat on my back. I had forgotten how a cotton tee affirms the experience of exercise in a way that synthetic fabrics cannot. There is something extremely satisfying about seeing visual evidence of your hard work slowly spread across a gray cotton tee over the course of a run. I donated all my techy tees the next day.Old cotton tees gave my workout rotation a pulse. Bringing a little swag to your daily constitutional is energizing even if, like me, you’re a 41-year-old guy hanging on to whatever bits of fitness you’ve got left and the swag is a 2020 Bernie Sanders campaign tie-dye. The best part about my cotton revival was I didn’t have to buy anything new. I just raided what I fondly refer to as “The Archive,” a dresser full of old cotton T-shirts collecting dust in my basement. It includes: a shirt I purchased from a Cleveland dive bar at closing time at one of my best friend’s weddings. A “Don’t Mess With Texas” shirt my Texan in-laws gave me. An impossibly soft tee from a beloved Brooklyn neighborhood restaurant. A most definitely unauthorized Detroit Lions Grateful Dead shirt a guy in my fantasy league sent me (recently a group of college-age hypebeasts told me this shirt was “sick” while I waited at a stoplight). You, too, can stunt at your local Equinox in your vintage tee of choice. You’ll feel more yourself, and less like a Lululemon mannequin.American Fred Lebow, 49, organiser of the New York City Marathon and co-organiser of the London Marathon., displays his distinctive race number before the start of the first London Marathon. Some 7,500 runner are taking part. (Photo by PA Images via Getty Images)PA Images/Getty ImagesNot to mention, cotton feels really nice. Picture your favorite cotton tee. It’s broken in, it’s faded, there are probably some holes. It’s yours. It has history! That comfort doesn’t have to be reserved for lounging around the house. Wear it to yoga. Throw it on for a crisp morning run in October. The softness is nostalgia talking, but it’s also physical: Cotton is the rare fabric that improves with age, softening a little more with every wash instead of pilling and roughening the way synthetics do.I’m not the only one who prefers natural fabrics against my skin. A fear of microplastics is creating a real resurgence of natural fibers, from underwear to workout gear. Natural-fabric underwear companies are popping up everywhere, and their messaging is laser focused on getting microplastics off our bodies. Tracksmith makes the Grayboy Tee, a 100% cotton running shirt that hearkens back to the halcyon days of America’s 1970s running boom. Merino wool T-shirts are nature’s answer to swampy summers.Also: Cotton doesn’t stink, and there is science to prove it. A study at Ghent University—not paid for by the cotton industry—collected T-shirts from volunteers after an hour-long spinning class and had a panel of trained sniffers (seriously) smell them the next day. The polyester shirts were significantly more foul. More musty, more sour, more ammonia-like.Cotton shirts? They came out smelling significantly better because cotton is hydrophilic—it absorbs moisture rather than trapping it—and unlike polyester, it doesn’t give odor-causing bacteria a surface to colonize and call home, Chris Callewaert (a.k.a. Dr. Armpit), the microbiologist who ran the Ghent University fabrics study, explained to me.BOSTON - APRIL 21: Bill Rodgers wins the Boston Marathon. (Photo by Frank O'Brien/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)Boston Globe/Getty ImagesAll my old synthetic shirts—and presumably yours too—stink for three distinct reasons. “One, the surface absorbs odorous molecules very well, and it doesn’t wash off very well in the laundry machine,” Callewaert says. “Two, the surface is an ideal breeding ground for smelly bacteria.” Put another way: Polyester repels water and clings to oil, and the oily residue in your sweat is the part that eventually stinks. Which means every time you throw that shirt in the wash, you’re trying to rinse grease out with water. And three: They’ll never have the built-in character and joy of a shirt from a tackle shop in Dublin that says “If this shirt is missing I’ve gone fishing!!”So please join me in the warm, worn embrace of cotton. Free yourself from the smelly tyranny of synthetics. Ignore the siren song of peak performance. You already have what you need. Walk into your local Planet Fitness with a little more swagger tomorrow. Hit the squat rack in some holey R.E.M. concert merch. Run in that cotton tee until it’s threadbare, because I can promise you this much: It feels good.