Ironing It Out -- `Wrinkle Free' Boom Started Two Years Ago With Pants, Moved Into Dress Shirts Last Year And Continues To Expand

Men don't iron.

There are a few liberated exceptions to this rule, but overall men take their clothes to the dry cleaner or palm this job off on their wives.

Science will probably soon discover the no-iron gene buried deep within the male molecular structure, but clothing manufacturers figured this out long ago. Cotton and polyester blends have been making end runs around the iron for years.

Or trying to. Shirts and pants sold as permanent press or "wrinkle resistant" are just that. Hang 'em up after taking them out of the dryer and they look pretty good, but the iron could make them look better.

The latest advertising blitz aimed at men is for "wrinkle free" clothes. I tried it out with one of the new cotton-polyester blend shirts. Close. "Almost wrinkle free" would be more accurate, but an unlikely slogan for an advertisement.

Many of the wrinkle-free shirts and pants are 100 percent cotton. That's the good news. Cotton is a wonderful fabric - soft, attractive, heavy. However, cotton loves wrinkles.

Several large manufacturers think they've found the technology to unravel the wrinkle in cotton, and each company claims their process is the best, guarding their methods like state secrets. In general this involves treating the fabric with resin, then heating it to about 800 degrees and applying pressure to the pants and shirts. Terms like "molecular bonding," "molecular memory," "fusing technology" and "Process 2000" get thrown around a lot.

The wrinkle-free boom started two years ago with pants, moved into dress shirts last year and continues to expand into shorts and sports shirts. The target market has been middle-age men, but with the expansion into sportswear stores are looking to deck out younger men in wrinkle-free clothing.

The all-cotton pants by Dockers, Savane and Haggar are available at most department stores and have proved to be popular with consumers. Styles include twills, loose-fit twills and denim. This month Nordstrom will begin selling similar pants under its own label.

Lamonts and The Bon Marche carry an Arrow oxford all-cotton wrinkle-free shirt in white, off-white and blue. Phil Molinari, a spokesman for a company marketing the shirt, said it took more than a year to develop the right technology for Arrow. "For consumers, the primary benefit is that the dress shirt doesn't wrinkle," he told the Daily News Record, a menswear newspaper.

It might be more accurate to say it doesn't wrinkle as much as a regular dress shirt. We used a new Arrow oxford all-cotton wrinkle-free shirt for the photograph accompanying this story. It was washed. The consensus, even among those who don't insist on a super-flat, creased look, was that it needed ironing.

Most Seattle chain and department stores stock the cotton and polyester blends, but have shied away from the all-cotton number.

A sales clerk at one of the Sears stores spoke candidly on the matter: "In my opinion it's a merchandising ploy. It's basically the same thing as a permanent press shirt. They rebake it, remake it and raise the price." He then said he'd rather not deal with any repercussions from that remark, and asked that his name not be used in the story.

Checking around closer to the top, the regional merchandise manager for Nordstrom, Fred Hackett, seconded the motion: "Wrinkle-free shirts have some wrinkling."

The pants are made from heavier material and the cut is much simpler than a shirt. "My layman's guess is that the fabrications used in shirtings didn't accept the wrinkle-free process as well as the fabrics used in pants," concluded Hackett.

The jury's verdict from shoppers isn't in yet. The all-cotton wrinkle-free shirt hasn't been on the market very long. But early warning signs suggest that this wrinkle-defying shirt has taken a bath.

That bath and an iron will make it look spiffy.