What’s Up With The Flylow Garrett Shirt – Review

In this Flylow Garrett Shirt review, I’ll briefly go over my experience with this particular mountain biking shirt I use for hiking/camping, and sometimes casual use.

The Flylow Garrett shirt is a beautiful, base layer, outdoor shirt, that is both stylish, super comfortable, and practical regarding summertime performance on the trail. It’s quick drying, antimicrobial (i.e. anti-smell) material lets you hang out in town after your day of hiking/biking.

However these features come at a premium price similar to other standard outdoor performance brands like Cotopaxi, Arc’teryx, and Patagonia.

Pro’s and Con’s

Pro’s: Stylish hiking/camping/biking shirt you can wear to the pub after your outdoor excursion; antimicrobial treatment keeps the sweat smell down, allowing the shirt to be used for multiple days when camping or backpacking; UPF 30+ keeps harmful UV out of the picture; medium fit – not too loose or tight; extremely comfortable invoking a sense of freedom

Con’s: Shirt is a bit long for activities other than biking; can be premium priced if not on sale.

Features

• Solar IQ material made of 92% polyester and 8% spandex which is exceptionally light and a bit stretchy
• UPF 30+ rated, which means 96% of the sun’s UV radiation (UVA + UVB) don’t make it through the material
• Ionic+ silver microbial treatment to keep the shirt smelling good for multi-day wears at camp or on the trail
• Sunglasses wipe with map print under the hem
• 30.5 inch center back length for bicycling

Flylow explains the Ionic+ as follows:

Ionic+ is a responsibly sourced silver mineral based antimicrobial treatment that stops bacteria at its source. If your clothes don’t smell after use, you can do less laundry between wears, saving time and water, and preserving the lifespan of them. When applied to fabric, this self cleaning treatment eliminates odors and leads to fewer washings, which reduce fabric degradation and conserves energy. Smell better and do less laundry: a win/win for everybody.

Flylow Gear

Comfort & Breathability

The Flylow Garrett is an extremely comfortable shirt when hiking or during casual wear. Its thin, soft, stretchy, lightweight material, and particular weave invoke a sense of youthful freedom, or novel lightheartedness, while on the trail or hanging around town.

It breaths exceptionally well making it a perfect base layer for hiking, or other cardio related activities where sweat evaporation is key. Even when it’s saturated in large areas with sweat, it doesn’t have that heavy or wet feel that you would get with a cotton shirt.

And the panels around the shoulders and neckline are woven in a mesh waffle pattern for lots of airflow. I’ve used it while hiking in extreme heat and have been happy with it’s comfort and performance. Heck I’ve used it casually in Bakersfield, CA, when it was 115°F and felt comfy.

Style & Quality

The Flylow Garrett’s two tone design (mine’s the cactus-night color), and unique boxed panel stitching around the shoulders and neckline offer more style than what is normally available for a summer hiking base layer. You’d have to go to Smart Wool’s colder weather base layer shirts to get the same level of style for trail wear.

The design of the shirt makes it just as home wearing it casually around town, as it is on the trail. And the soft material sewn into the inside of the shirt with the map print, specifically for wiping down your glasses, adds an extra aesthetic punch to it.

The stitch work on the shirt is high quality, with no loose ends or fraying on any of the threads.

The only critical thing I could say about it, is because it’s designed for mountain biking, and not hiking or casual wear, it is quite long.

Mobility

As previously stated, using it underneath my Gregory Zulu 30 day pack, which has shoulder and hip belts doesn’t create any mobility issues. This is because the shirt is stretchy enough that it can handle these confines with ease. I’m able to twist and turn, bend down, squat/lunge, raise my arms, etc. and still feel free in doing so.

Casual use feels even freer, with the large neck hole, and looser fit, even for the smaller size I purchased.

Versatility

With its ionic + antimicrobial treatment, the Flylow Garrett works as a hiking/camping base layer, a running shirt, obviously a mountain biking base layer, a bike to work shirt, and for casual wear due to its stylish design. However due to its thin, light material I would caution users not to use it for any type of rough sport, or climbing/bouldering.

Weather Resistance & Durability

The Flylow Garrett shirt has a 30+ UPF rating to keep your torso & shoulders away from harmful UV radiation. However, it doesn’t have any rain or water protection that would cause beading or shedding down the shirt. Instead its thin, light polyester/spandex material doesn’t hold much water to begin with, and just dries quickly. It doesn’t really create that damp feeling next to your skin when wet.

After using the shirt with my Gregory Zulu 30 day pack, through the summer hiking season, I’ve noticed minor wear to the shirt that may coincide with where the pack’s shoulder straps, and hip belt, sandwich the shirt between those and my body. There are a handful of the fuzzy balled ‘pilling’ phenomena happening in these key areas. And there are a few areas on the back of the shirt where small inconspicuous creases or wrinkles have formed, which upon further inspection look as though they’ve been created by the subtle collapse of the material between the mini-waffle shaped patterns that the fabric is constructed with.

My conclusion is that though this shirt is great for mountain biking, or casual wear in hot climates, it may not be the best long term hiking base layer shirt that you would expect to keep for several seasons, if you are using a heavy pack like I do.

My REI short sleeved base layer shirts seem to be outperforming this shirt in terms of durability thus far.

Further Reading

Thanks for checking out this short form, Flylow Garrett Shirt review! Next check out my hiking clothes series to see what else is working for So Cal (and a bit of No Cal and Central Cal).

See ya out there…