The Pleating Years

Cut the garment two or three times too large, sew it whole, then feed the finished thing flat into a heat press so the pleats are set into a shirt rather than into a bolt of cloth. That order is the invention, and it went out as its own line in 1993. Washable in a hotel sink, dry inside an hour, folds down to a coil about the length of a forearm.

The unflattering part is that this is the one archive on the list that never closed. Most of what you are chasing is still being made, which means the premium you paid for a nineties piece bought you a discontinued colour and not a different construction. Old polyester also keeps every smell it has ever met, in order. You know this. You decided the colour was worth it, and on some days it is.

So chase the dead colours and the single cloth experiments from the end of the nineties, where the idea got genuinely strange, and buy everything else new. A pleat that has been through somebody else's iron is gone, and no amount of money brings it back.