Ironing dress shirts is a time-consuming process when you do it right, even if you’re adept at it. And if you don’t do it yourself, you’re probably paying somebody else to do it for you. Your annual bill for dry cleaning your shirts alone is about $400, and that’s a conservative estimate. Nor does it include the expense of getting there and back, measured in time and fuel. Alternately, if you have your laundry delivered that’ll cost you, too. In short, you will pay several times the price of a traditional dress shirt over its lifetime. When you do the math, you’ll soon discover a high quality wrinkle-free dress shirt —even a pricey one—is a better use of your resources than a steep cleaning bill.

A Wrinkle-Free Shirt By Any Other Name

You Get What You Pay For

Nowadays you’ll find loads of beautifully styled men’s wrinkle-free shirts and trousers, many tailored of 100% pure cotton. They are perfectly suited for work, business travel, and recreational travel. But the label can be confusing: makers sometimes describe a men’s dress shirt or pant as wrinkle-free or wrinkle-resistant, other times non-iron, or even just easy-care.

So what exactly is the difference between the claims on these labels? The short answer is, nothing: each describes a garment that has been processed and treated to resist wrinkling in a normal wash cycle. And you might come across other terms describing the same anti-wrinkling properties:

• minimum care
• easy-to-iron
• no-iron
• wash-and-wear
• crease-resistant
• permanent press
• shrink proof

When it comes to a wrinkle-free garment, these are simply synonyms.

What does make a difference is the quality of the shirt: you get what you pay for. Cheaper shirts tend to wrinkle more willingly out of the dryer, an observation corroborated by consumers. The other standout is stiffness: wearers of wrinkle-free or wrinkle-resistant clothing sometimes describe a fabric hand that is scratchy and unyielding—and prone to tearing more easily at the seams. But when you spend more on your wrinkle-free dress shirt or pants you’ll be far less likely to notice a substantial difference between those garments and the “traditional” shirts and pants hanging in your closet.

What Makes A Shirt Wrinkle-Free?

The highest quality non-iron clothing for men is exactly as its name implies: shirts and trousers emerge from the dryer smooth and polished, looking freshly pressed. How do they do it? The answer lies in a process where the fabric is immersed in resin that realigns the molecular structure of the material. In the case of cotton, this process gives it a “memory:” the molecules line up and remember where they’re supposed to be. Left untreated they break apart at the end of a heated drying cycle and rebuild themselves in a bockety configuration known as a wrinkle.

The most obvious benefit of including at least a few no-iron pieces in your wardrobe is freedom from the ironing board, to say nothing of saving time and money if you have your shirts and pants professionally cleaned. This admirable quality also makes wrinkle-free garb ideal for travel, when you have better things to do than worry about a wrinkled wardrobe. And while the best quality wrinkle-free shirts and pants for men may cost more out of the package than traditional pants and shirts, they will likely save you money over the long haul.

Evolved Clothing: The Modern Wrinkle-Free Shirt

Cotton is by nature a soft, durable material, but historically the wrinkle-free rendering process changed the material, making it stiffer and occasionally even brittle, thereby shortening its life (especially if it was cheaply made). The same process also made it difficult to remove stains. The good news is that this process, first developed in the 1940s, continues to evolve and improve, as one would expect. Early problems with fabric degradation and grease and oil stains have been all but wiped out in higher quality wrinkle-free shirts and pants, and processing companies continually search for improvements. Probably the biggest advance over the last decade or so has come in aesthetics: wrinkle-free fabric is pretty. And wrinkle-free processing has gotten cleaner and “greener” over time, a beautiful development.

Modern wrinkle-free shirts are smart and forward-thinking, to say nothing of fashion-forward. Call them no-iron, wrinkle-free, or wrinkle-resistant, but however you call them, wrinkle-free shirts and pants belong in the wardrobe of any well-dressed man.