This short article is going to go over how to take care of your pieces and why.
Why Should I Care?
The main reason you should care is obvious; why ruin a piece of clothing when you can take care of it and not have to buy another one?
The second is a bit more complicated. When you take care of your clothes you ensure that they wont be in the trash, this helps reduce the insane amount of waste that the fashion industry is responsible for. It also ensures that you won’t buy another piece, this helps reduce your carbon footprint as there is no need to transport the garment to you.
Cold Water Wash
This is a no-brainer, if you’re not washing towels or bath mats there is no need to wash something in hot water. When you wash something in warm water you damage your clothes in two ways. The first is what the heat does to your fabric, when cotton is exposed to heat it looses its elastic properties, causing it to become more stiff and fragile, breaking down the fibres. The second way it damages your clothes is how it fades the colour, when the hot water seeps into the fabric it tends to cause dye to release itself from the fabric, changing the original colour of the wash.
The only time you wouldn’t cold water wash something is when you have to hand wash the garment.
Hang Drying
This is super simple, hang dry everything you can, especially cotton pieces like shirts, hoodies, and sweats. When something is put into the dryer it removes the elasticity of the fabric, shrinking it and weakening the fibres. This is most prevalent in wool and cotton pieces.
Another way to dry things is to lay them flat, by laying them flat you prevent the weight of the fabric stretching the piece out. Honestly this is only really necessary with wool pieces as the knit can be loosened with gravity
Hand Washing
Hand washing is a huge pain, the only time you should do with is with wool and raw denim. Raw denim is un-bleached and unwashed denim which when washed looses a lot of its dye. Wool when washed can shrink like crazy, with cold water or hot. The best way to hand wash is the fill up a tub or a container with cold or barely lukewarm water with a little bit of gentle detergent and just scrunch the clothing.
By doing this you help maintain the original look and feel of the piece.
How Often
Washing clothes every time you wear them is a very dangerous idea, the only time you should wash something is when you sweat in them or get them dirty. The one thing you should wash every time is socks and underwear (DUH).
When you wash something every time you damage the fibres, regardless of how careful you are.
How To Store Clothes
OK, you washed your clothes, dried them, and now you have to put them away.
The first thing you need to do is to see how much space you have, I don’t have a clue how big of a space you have so I’m going to assume you have a mega mansion and your closet space is the size of a small country.
Shirts: I think that folding shirts on top of one another helps prevent maintaining the shape of the shoulders while also allowing your to find them easily, the only time you would hang them up is when they are a button-up or if you have very high quality hangers.
Pants: Pants should be always hung up, it helps so much with storage and makes them far easier to find, 20 pairs of jeans are hard to tell from one another when you only see the front of them.
Sweaters: Sweaters should be folded, no discussion. Gravity kills knit pieces by stretching them out, fold them in your closet and stack them on top of each other.
Tops and Jackets: Jackets and thick tops like hoodies or sweatshirts should be hung up with think hangers to prevent damaging the shoulders of the piece.
Shoes: Don’t be gross, have a shelf or container for your shoes so the dirt doesn’t get on your floor, anytime I go to a friends house and I see their shoes just laying around a little part of my middle-eastern soul dies