You bought the right size. It came out of the first wash a size smaller, shorter in the body, and now it rides up when you lift your arms.

Cotton shrinking is not a defect and it is not really the fibre's fault. It is tension being released — and once you know where that tension came from, most of it is avoidable.

Clothes shed. Every wash pulls loose fibres off the surface of a garment and sends them down the drain — that part is unavoidable, and it has always happened.

What has changed is what the fibres are made of.

Two shirts. Same weight, same price, same colour. One still looks composed a year in. The other grew a fuzzy halo across the chest by month two.

The difference usually is not the cotton itself. It is what happened to the fibres before anyone spun them into yarn.