Let’s get one important detail out of the way: Fite’s cashmere-blend pieces aren’t cheap. Tanks go for $95, short sleeve tees for $120, and long sleeve tees are $145. They never go on sale. That’s a price point that we would typically describe as somewhat irrational, but damn… Fite makes it worth the money.

Holly Peterson started Fite—short for “fitted tee”—about four years ago because she saw a hole in the market for the elusive “perfect” t-shirt. “I was a mom, I was raising money for charities, and I was wearing a lot of t-shirts, but I couldn’t find one that I could wear with everything. I didn’t want to have a lot of t-shirts in my closet. I didn’t want to have a t-shirt that looked crappy after one wash. I wanted to wear it with a suit or my pajama bottoms. Keep it simple, keep it easy, but after 15 washes I wanted it to look good. I didn’t want to dry clean it,” she explains.

Peterson’s solution is a custom cashmere-micromodal blend that is light enough to wear in the summer and warm enough to layer in the winter. It has enough weight to drape beautifully and offer coverage, but it still looks effortless and cool. And yes, it really, truly is machine washable.

Fite hooked Rockyt up with a couple of tank styles in 2019. We have been wearing and washing them non-stop for eight months, and they’re still going strong through travel, spills, and myriad messes that life can produce. While we usually hang them to dry, they’ve performed splendidly in the dryer on low heat. Neither tank has pilled, which—frankly—is shocking.

“I wanted a pretty tee that you didn’t have to spend $500 on; that was curved, but not clingy. It’s a super fine line. It’s been a labor of love. Most cashmere blends and nice t-shirts have to be dry cleaned. You’re worried about it and you want it to stay nice, but [with too much dry-cleaning] they turn yellow. I wanted to be able to travel with it. I want to wash it in the sink, shake it, and it to be dry by the morning,” Peterson says. While we have yet to experiment with sink-washing our Fite tanks, she’s certainly nailed the rest.

Can you really justify paying $95 or more for a tank or a t-shirt? When it’s ethically-made, and it looks and wears as well as Fite, the product is worth the price. And if you’re starting the decade with a renewed commitment to buying fewer, better things, splurging on a single Fite tee instead of dozen mediocre ones is a solid start.

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