There is no single number more important to the way a t-shirt feels than its weight.
Not the cut. Not the colour. Not the brand on the label. The weight. The grams of cotton per square metre, woven into the structure of the piece, decides almost everything about how it falls on your shoulders, how it holds its shape after the third wash, and how it looks on you in year three when most cheaper tees have already been demoted to gym rags.
The Core Tee is 240 GSM. We arrived at that number after a long conversation with our mill in Porto and forty-something fabric trials. This piece is the conversation, abbreviated.
What GSM actually means
GSM is grams per square metre. It is the standard textile-industry measure of fabric weight, regardless of the type of cotton, the type of weave, or the country it was woven in.
A square metre of 100 GSM cotton — the weight of a sheer summer dress — weighs 100 grams. A square metre of 420 GSM cotton — the weight of a heavyweight hoodie body — weighs 420 grams. Everything else falls somewhere on that spectrum.
For t-shirts specifically, the usable range is roughly 140 GSM to 300 GSM. Below 140, the fabric is too sheer to wear without an undershirt. Above 300, the fabric starts to behave like a sweatshirt — it stands, it doesn't drape, it doesn't move with the body the way a t-shirt should.
Most of the brands you've heard of sit somewhere between 120 and 160GSM. There's a reason for that. It's cheap.
The weight spectrum, briefly
For context, here is roughly where the major weight categories sit in t-shirt production:
120–160 GSM — Fast fashion. H&M basics. The Primark three-pack. Pleasant the day you buy it. Visibly worn-out by month two. Lasts about a season if you're gentle with it. Most of what's sold in this range is because the brand can sell it for £8 and not because the brand thinks it's the right weight.
170–200 GSM — Standard high-street. Uniqlo Supima tees sit here. AllSaints, Cos, most premium-mid brands. Good drape, decent longevity, looks fine on the rack and the body. The compromise pick — slightly thin, slightly droopy with time, but inoffensive.
210–240 GSM — Premium midweight. This is where Aimé Leon Dore lives, where Fear of God Essentials lives, where most of the elevated streetwear category lives. The fabric has body. It holds the shoulder line. It doesn't sheer-through. It looks like a piece you bought intentionally.
250–290 GSM — Heavyweight territory. Margiela GAT-era tees. Some of the boxy-fit American milled brands. The fabric stands almost like a light sweater. Beautiful structure. Slightly less forgiving on the body. Better for layering than for warmer climates.
300+ GSM — At this point you're in sweatshirt-body territory. The fabric does not move like a tee anymore. It moves like a piece of structured cotton outerwear.
The Core Tee sits at the top end of the premium midweight band. We picked 240 specifically — not 220, not 260 — for three reasons.
Why 200 was never an option
The most common mistake we could have made was to chase the price tier where most of our competitors live: a 140–180 GSM piece, ringspun cotton, made in Bangladesh or Egypt for a unit cost in the £4–6 range. That's the £25 retail tee at H&M. It's the £35 retail tee at Cos. It would have been our £45 tee with the V emblem on it.
It would also have been a t-shirt that started to thin out after about twelve washes. That stretched at the neckline within six months. That looked like every other tee on every other rack, because at 160 GSM, every fabric looks roughly the same. There is not enough material for the differences in cotton quality, weave, and finishing to actually show up in the hand.
We didn't want the brand's first piece to be one you would replace.
Drop 01 is meant to be in your wardrobe in 2029. That's a different brief.
Why we didn't go to 280
Going heavier was also tempting. There is a certain hype-economy logic to "ours is heavier than yours." Premium streetwear has spent the last decade arms-racing into 250+ GSM territory, partly because the heavier the fabric, the more it signals "made well" the second you pick it up off the table.
But here's what no one tells you about 280 GSM tees: most people don't actually wear them daily.
They wear them once a week. They wear them when it's cold. They wear them as a layering piece. They don't wear them in summer because they're hot. They don't wear them under a jacket because they're bulky. They don't wear them with shorts because the weight throws off the proportions.
A 280 GSM tee is a beautiful object that lives in a drawer for nine months a year.
We didn't want to build a beautiful drawer object.
We wanted to build the piece you reach for every other day, in every season, in every context. Training. Travel. Saturday. Office, if your office allows it. The piece that earns its rotation by being the easiest piece to put on, in the largest number of situations.
That is not a 280 GSM tee. That is a 240 GSM tee.
Why 240 specifically
Two-forty is the highest weight at which the cotton still drapes like a t-shirt instead of like a sweatshirt. We tested 220, 230, 240, 250, and 260 on the same body type, in the same cut, with the same finishing. The 240 was the last sample in the lineup where the fabric still moved the way we wanted it to — fluid through the chest, but enough body to hold the shoulder seam clean across the deltoid.
At 250, the fabric started to lock. At 260, the fabric stood on its own — beautiful for the rack, less natural on the body.
Two-forty is the threshold. It's not arbitrary. It's the heaviest fabric weight at which the piece still behaves like a t-shirt and not like something else.
It is also — and this matters less to the wearer but matters a lot to us — the weight at which the longevity curve flattens. A 240 GSM premium-combed-cotton tee, garment-dyed and pre-washed properly, holds its shape and finish for somewhere between three and five years of regular wear. The drop-off after that is gradual rather than catastrophic. The piece ages. It doesn't fail.
A 180 GSM tee, by contrast, doesn't age. It deteriorates.
What this means for how it wears
A few honest expectations for anyone buying the Core Tee:
- It will feel slightly heavier than what you're used to. That feeling fades after the first wear and is what you'll later miss when you put on a lighter tee.
- It will not stretch out at the neckline. Two-forty GSM with proper rib finishing solves the neckline problem most tees never solve.
- It will fade slowly and evenly. Garment-dyeing means the colour is in the fabric, not painted on top of it. After three years, the piece will look intentionally worn-in, not accidentally worn-out.
- It will hold a sharp shoulder line. The weight is what does this. A lighter tee cannot — physically cannot — hold the shoulder the same way regardless of how good the pattern is.
We're not asking you to take any of this on faith. The piece is designed to prove all of it in your wardrobe, on your body, over a long enough period that the difference becomes obvious.
That's the standard. That's the build.
One last thing
We did not build the Core Tee to be the loudest piece in the drop. We built it to be the most-worn. The piece that earns its rotation quietly, day after day, until you forget which one it was that started this and remember only that the standard you used to put up with on lesser tees no longer feels acceptable.
We don't break. We build. We become.
— V.
