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Reddit is truly great. Like everything, it has its issues, but if you know where to look you’ll discover some of the most passionate and nerdy discussions on the internet. Like Monday, when someone posed a seemingly simple question to a personal favorite subreddit, Male Fashion Advice: “What's a good brand for plain t-shirts?”
Five hundred comments flooded in — for context, the other current top posts on the subforum have 57, 131, 6, 1, 9, and 15 comments — and one that I, an alleged menswear expert, had never heard of was the clear winner: a roughly $5 tee you can buy from Next Level off Amazon.
The Next Level suggestion is the most upvoted comment in the thread. “They fit slim, last forever, and are super comfy,” one user writes. Next Level’s bonafides get even more bonafide when you hop over to Amazon. It has four-and-a-half stars from 767 customer reviews and Next Level owns four of the top 11 spots in Amazon’s most popular tees rankings.
Next Level is a wholesale apparel company that was in the mix with Gildan to acquire American Apparel, which means it makes a bajillion different T-shirt options that can be used for pretty much anything. One print shop owner praises it on Reddit: “I work at a screen print shop and touch a lot of shirts. Next level is great, you really can't go wrong.”
So, go nuts. Triblend (a tiny bit pricier, but still in the $7 range) and Premium seem to be the most popular, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg. By my count, the T-shirt comes in 32 different color options — from “Banana Cream” to “Heavy Metal” — and you can also order varying packages. The initial landing page claims to sell a T-shirt that’s only 99 cents, but after getting hung up on by Amazon customer service — I’m sure it wasn’t personal — and then spending 40 minutes chatting with a rep, I wasn’t able to discover which one was dollar store-priced. Regardless, I don’t know of any other place where I can purchase a tee with these kinds of credentials for $5.59.
Other popular recommendations from the forum include Bella + Canvas, another wholesaler, and Uniqlo, which is similarly priced but less heavily rec’d. If you’re looking for something in a higher price bracket, two standout brands were Wolf Vs. Goat (T-shirts range in price from $40 to $120) and Our Legacy (roughly $85 to $105).
You could buy about 15 Next Level tees at that price, though.