Why Your Dry
Cleaner Could Be Your New BFF
This is the first in
a series of posts about clothing care
and how to make your clothes last longer.
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| Doing Laundry in India Photo courtesy of abrinsky |
Eight reasons why you should take good care of your clothes:
1. Protect your investment in terms of cost and shopping time
2. You love it
3. It’s one of a kind or hard to find
4. You look fabulous in it
5. It represents a memory
6. It’s collectible, or an iconic silhouette or designer
7. You wear a special size: plus, tall or petite
8. You pay to have your clothes altered
Your clothes are your identity and often, after you’ve spent hours on the hunt for just the right must-have, you’ve got an investment in time and money. Add what could be a hefty price tag for a fabulous silk T-shirt or pair of premium denim jeans, and you’re talking about a sizable sum. So what "don’t" you do when it’s time to care for your clothes?
My mother was diligent in her insistence that I learn how to care for my clothes. She rotated our seasonal wardrobes like clockwork, washed and blocked the wool by hand and held captive anything I left in a pile on the floor. Ironing is a lost art, even I don’t own one anymore, and I’ve got first hand knowledge that not everyone is conscientious about sorting colors and using the delicate cycle.
Knowing how to care for clothing and natural fibers paid off when I worked as a fashion stylist. My two worst experiences with potentially ruined, one of a kind pieces was on the sets of commercials. Had I not been armed and dangerous with the knowledge of what to do, it's possible I could have blown my career with two mishaps.
A good dry cleaners can take a load off, not only with the convenient services they offer, like having a tailor on duty, but especially for their knowledge of fabrics and various methods for cleaning and stain removal.
If you’ve ever had a bad experience with a dry cleaner, it’s likely the real culprit of any damage was the care label itself. A care label may offer information on how to clean the outer shell of a garment, but overlook mentioning the lining is made from a non-stable fiber, one that hasn’t been preshrunk, for example.
Care Label Guide Courtesy of The Soap and Detergent Association
Many fashionable fabrications and treatments developed for garments make them more difficult to clean, like premium denim. According to Robert Shapiro, General Manager at Milt & Edie’s Dry Cleaners in Burbank, California, “Premium denim jeans have a lot of different washes, embellishments and coatings, like wax. Waxed cotton requires specific care. Soap dissolves the waxed coating, which doesn’t hold up during the dry cleaning process either,” Shapiro said with a sigh. “When we see waxed cotton, we steam clean the item. We do a lot of business with the movie and TV studios, they trust us. And we never stopped cleaning by hand, we’ve always provided hand-processing services, especially for couture and vintage garments.”
A care label can be misleading and label enforcement is almost nonexistent.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) oversees compliance of the care labeling rule, which required manufacturers and importers to attach care instructions to garments. According to the FTC Website, over the last 22 years, they have only brought 16 enforcement actions.
What You Need to Know
The four most important steps you can do to ensure the longevity and wearability of your favorite things.
1. Inspect your clothes thoroughly after wearing to note any spots, spills or stains. Spot cleaning can often prevent a permanent stain. If you don't know how to spot clean, take the garment to your cleaners as soon as possible. Don’t hang it back in your closet, where it will be forgotten and the spot has time to set.
2. Inspect your things before you leave them with a dry cleaner, in order to identify possible stains and spills. Have a conversation with the manager of the dry cleaners if your garment has any of these features to make sure they have experience with this type of clothing: quilted, has a coating or special treatment, a lining, embellishments like sequins, is made of a synthetic leather or leather.
3. Look for and read the care labels in your clothes and point any specific instructions out to the dry cleaners. For example, some labels may say a certain dry cleaning chemical cannot be tolerated.
4. Be sure to make a point your garment is vintage or couture. Most vintage clothing, made before the seventies, was constructed out of natural fibers, but as such, these items are older and the fibers are weaker. If your garment hasn’t been stored or cared for properly, the dry cleaner may be able make the best decision in how to clean the garment.
Find a good dry cleaner on the Dry Cleaning & Laundry Institute website.
Milt and Edie's Drycleaners are in Burbank, California, around the corner from Warner Brothers, Disney and Universal Studios.
