By Chris Cosci

Ironing is one of those tedious household chores I could live without. Actually, I could probably get along without any household chores, but that's another issue. I don't think it's unfair to ask that clothes not require ironing. After going through the laundry, clothes should come out smooth and ready to wear.

Instead, most laundry comes out looking like a prune, only with more wrinkles. This is even the case for so-called "wrinkle-free" clothing. Basically, wrinkle-free clothing is only wrinkle-free in the store. Once you bring it home, it will wrinkle when you wear it, touch it, or even look at it. As my editor put it, wrinkle-free seems to mean "free to wrinkle" when you leave the store.

So, is there any hope for those of us who hate ironing? More importantly, is there any hope for people who actually like ironing?

Seriously, iron-free clothing is no longer a fantasy. Italian fashion designer Corpo Nove (which is Italian for "you can't afford our clothing") has come up with the latest in high-tech apparel. They have developed a shirt called the Oricalco that uses a titanium alloy set to a preprogrammed shape. When a minimum amount of heat is applied, namely blowing the shirt with a hair dryer, the alloy recovers its original shape, and the wrinkles disappear. You can crumple this shirt into a ball and stuff it into a gym bag for three weeks. Blow it with a hair dryer and voila, it's ready to wear.

Of course, this is a designer shirt, so you could safely assume you won't find it on the discount rack at K-mart. You would probably expect to pay a couple of hundred dollars for this shirt, right? Say $200-300? How about $500? $1,000?

For $1,000, you could probably buy a small wardrobe of wrinkle-intensive shirts and pants and still have some money left over for socks and underwear. However, this iron-free shirt does not cost $1,000. Break out the checkbook, folks. This marvel of fashion design will set you back $4,000.

Now, some of you may feel that $4,000 is a little expensive for one shirt, even if it does mean that you'll never have to iron it. However, you're probably not considering the major fringe benefit of owning a titanium-alloy shirt: entertainment.

I'm thinking about seeing somebody wear this shirt around, I don't know, let's say the world's largest magnet. In Stoney Creek, Ontario, Walker Magnetics has developed a contender for the World's Largest Suspended Electromagnet. Weighing in at 88 tons, this magnet can hold approximately 270 tons of metal. One witness tells of how he was walking past this magnet with a utility knife in his back pocket. The magnet lifted the knife right out of his pocket from seven feet away.

Now, imagine someone walking past this magnet wearing the titanium-alloy shirt. Imagine the awe-inspiring spectacle of watching this person being sucked up off his feet towards the magnet. $4,000 suddenly sounds like a bargain, doesn't it?

The technology for this shirt is still being worked on. The designer's next stage is to program the alloy to automatically shorten the sleeves when the weather turns warmer. This sounds interesting, but I think I'll just wait until they develop the shirt that washes and hangs itself.