T-shirts for the Female Gaze

You could buy eight T-shirts from Hanes for the price of a single T-shirt from Flore Flore, a small brand that in recent years has popped up in fashionable boutiques across the world.

That hasn’t stopped some people from “buying them in bulk” at McMullen, a store with locations in San Francisco and Oakland, Calif., said its owner, Sherri McMullen.

Her stores sell multiple styles from Flore Flore, which are made of organic cotton. The brand’s offerings include the Car ($105), a crew-neck T-shirt with a shrunken fit and hipbone-grazing hemline; the Esmé ($94), a muscle tank; the Steffi ($108), a boat-neck top with three-quarter sleeves; and the May Cami ($89), a square-neck camisole.

Flòrian van Zuilen, who started Flore Flore in Amsterdam in 2021, said the prices for the shirts reflect the research and development required to design them, as well as the costs of making them in Portugal, a country recognized for its textile manufacturing industry. More than 80 fittings were conducted to determine the proportions of Flore Flore’s four original T-shirt styles, Ms. van Zuilen said, a process that took about eight months.

The largest sizes of those T-shirts, XL, roughly equates to a size 10. “Flore Flore is a bit fitted, but women, mothers, grandmas, all different body types wear it,” Ms. van Zuilen said. “The fabric stretches, so even though the shirt is a bit shorter, you can wear it with high-waist pants or, for the younger audience, with low pants for a bit of midriff.”