Garment care
A decade is a realistic target. Here is what it takes.
- Wash less
- Air first. Most things do not need cleaning, only resting
- Wash cold
- 30°C or below, gentle cycle, half the detergent you think
- Never tumble dry
- Heat plus abrasion is what ages natural fibre fastest
- Repairs
- We repair anything we made, at cost, for as long as you own it
The short version
Four habits, and the rest is detail.
Hang the garment up when you take it off and give it a day before you decide it needs washing. Wash cold, gently, with about half the detergent the bottle suggests — excess detergent does not rinse out and stiffens fabric over time.
Dry flat or on a line, in shade. Store on a wide hanger or folded, never sealed in plastic, which traps moisture against the fibre.
Then repair rather than replace. A split seam is twenty minutes of someone's time. A missing button is five. Neither is a reason to stop wearing something.
Photography · 4:5
Care: a linen shirt drying flat in shade, seams straightened by hand while damp.
Airing is not a compromise on washing. For wool it is better than washing.
Fibre by fibre
What each material actually wants.
Cotton and linen
Machine wash cold on a gentle cycle. Line dry in shade — a tumble dryer is the single fastest way to age cotton, because the heat breaks fibres that abrasion then finishes off.
Press while faintly damp for a crisp finish, or do not press at all. Linen is meant to crease and we have not treated ours to stop it.
Silk
Hand wash cold with a pH-neutral soap. Never wring it — press the water out between two towels and dry flat, away from sun. Heat and alkaline soap damage silk far more than water does.
Steam rather than iron. If you must iron, use the reverse, a cloth between, and the lowest setting your iron has.
Wool
Wash it far less than you think. Air a wool garment overnight and most odour goes on its own; wool is naturally antibacterial and every clean shortens its life.
Brush along the nap with a soft clothes brush rather than lint-rolling. Dry clean once a season at most, and spot-clean in between.
Hemp and bamboo
Machine wash cold, line dry. Hemp softens noticeably for its first ten washes and then stops changing — if a piece feels stiff when it arrives, it is not finished becoming itself yet.
Bamboo is weaker wet than dry, so support the weight of the garment when you lift it out rather than letting it hang from one corner.
Storage
Six months in a wardrobe does more damage than six months of wear.
01
Clean before storing, not after
Moths and silverfish are drawn to body oils and food traces rather than to the fabric itself. A garment put away dirty is the one that comes out with holes.02
Let it breathe
Cotton or the plant-starch garment bag your piece arrived in — both breathe. Never a sealed plastic box or a vacuum bag, which hold moisture against the fibre and set creases permanently.03
Fold knits, hang tailoring
Anything knitted or heavy stretches on a hanger. Jackets and coats need a wide wooden hanger that supports the shoulder; a wire hanger will deform a shoulder in a season.04
Cedar or lavender, not mothballs
Both work as deterrents and neither leaves a smell you have to wash out. Refresh cedar by sanding it lightly once a year.05
Keep it dark and dry
Sunlight fades and weakens fibre, and humidity encourages mildew. A closed wardrobe away from an outside wall is enough.06
Unfold it twice a year
Refold along different lines. A permanent crease eventually becomes a permanent weakness, particularly in silk.
Repairs
When something goes wrong.
A seam has split
Stop wearing it and send it to us. Restitching is quick and cheap; a split that has run is neither.
The longer answer
Every piece is logged against its fabric roll, so we can usually repair with the same fabric rather than an approximation. Write first and we will tell you where to send it.
A button is missing
We keep the remainder of every button set we have used. Ask and we will post one.
The longer answer
If we genuinely cannot match it — reclaimed horn is never uniform — we replace the whole set rather than leave you with five that agree and one that does not.
It does not fit any more
Side seams carry 4 cm of allowance and hems 5–6 cm. Most pieces can be altered twice.
The longer answer
The first alteration is free within a year of purchase. After that we alter at cost, indefinitely, whether the change you need is larger or smaller.
There is a stain and I have made it worse
Send it before trying anything else. Most home remedies set a stain rather than lifting it.
The longer answer
Do not use hot water on protein stains, do not rub silk, and do not bleach anything. Blot, let it dry, and tell us what it was — the substance matters more than the mark.