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What was the final conclusion here? Judging by the "control" burn, it seems that the 'new' style IS cotton, but that the 'old' style was NOT. Is that correct? I guess we would need to somehow verify that the cotton t-shirt swatch WAS indeed 100% cotton. Any ideas?
Kinda jealous you get to watch this with fresh eyes. It would be like watching the Sopranos for the first time.
Basically, in the end, it turned out that SG chambray, in some iteration, was some kind of cotton-poly blend. The story started with Iammatt talking about a chambray shirting Mariano Rubinacci recommended to him. It was a slubby chambray with more "character." That started a small craze for it among bespoke customers. Will at ASW picked up a couple of bolts and sold cut lengths. Torsten also sold some through his shop, Grunwald. Shirting came in different colors, like light blue, peach, and even yellow (IIRC).
Anyway, the shirting was expensive. I can't remember how much, but much higher than what most people would normally pay for such things (I think maybe $30 per half meter, but I'm not totally sure). Carl at CEGO was skeptical of it and said something about it on the forums, but the comment mostly fell on deaf ears. Then Foo for some reason got the idea to test it with the video you saw above. This seemed to have proved that, in fact, the shirting was in part poly-blend. I think someone may have also confirmed with SG at some point (although they were never totally clear, iirc).
At this point, there were like a billion iterations of this shirting. Will had a post on his blog about, like, 1G, 2G, 3G, all the way up to like Nth-G iterations of the famous SG chambray. It was never clear to me which were supposedly poly blend. All that "character" -- which was really just pilling -- was because of the poly content, not some old world technique. The wrinkle resistance was also because of poly.
Torsten ended up having a fire sale (see what I did there?). I picked up something like 30 yards from that sale, which today I still have stashed away. Bunch of customers called Will, angrily demanding refunds for lengths they bought years and years ago (lol). Honestly, I love the stuff. It has a nice light blue color, it's wrinkle resistant, and it comes with a bit of StyleForum history. It also looks more interesting to me that plain poplin, but isn't as casual as oxford. I only wish I bought more from Torsten's sale.