To the gentlemen here, how often do you dry clean your professional clothes?
I have a business casual wardrobe of about 4 (2 black/grey, 2 khaki) and 10 or so dress shirts. How often do you think I should get these clothes dry-cleaned? What can be machine-washed safely at home? I just want to make sure that I’m not shortening the life of my clothes by dry-cleaning too often (or too rarely).
Thanks for your input.
When they’re dirty and spot-cleaning won’t cut it. Trousers can go several wearings. Jackets should only be dry-cleaned a couple times a year tops – same goes for suits. I clean sweaters every couple wearings, but I’ll use Dryel for odor if they’re otherwise clean.
Dress (and any other) shirts: every time. Nobody needs to smell that. But you can machine-wash most dress shirts: use the Delicate cycle and dry low, or hang dry if you’re that worried. If they’re silk or something and it’s breaking your bank, again, Dryel works if it’s just smell you’re worried about.
I’ll clean my suit every 1-2 times that I wear it, but that comes out to be yearly. It’s not like I wear it to work or anything.
Same with my silk shirts, but they get a lot more wear.
My most frequently dry-cleaned items are lightweight, light-colored summer suits, ie: linen and seersucker. They rumple, sometimes stain, and are liable to sweat through.
Woolens might get cleaned once a year, or even once in two years if they’re not worn often. A steam pressing is often all they need to bring them back to life.
A business casual wardrobe of 4 what? Suits? Dress slacks?
The truth is, most anything that isn’t lined can be put in a washing machine in a cold-water cycle. Drying is trickier. For slacks, you could probably get away with hanging them to dry and iron them (using a pressing cloth) yourself.
Ditto with dress shirts made of cotton or poly/cotton. In fact, your home washing machine will probably be a lot gentler on them than a commercial laundry.
That leaves sports coats, overcoats and suits. Make sure you hang them after wearing (to let the wrinkles ease out). Back in the day when I wore suits to work, I’d clean them about once every dozen wearings unless they’d gotten stained or I sweated up a storm in them.
:smack: I meant to say “4 pairs of pants”.
Thank you all for your responses. I think I’ve clearly been dry cleaning too often. I suppose I really didn’t realize that these things could be washed at home so easily.
Since I work at home, my professional wardrobe doesn’t need dry cleaning. Actually, with rare exceptions, the only thing I wear that needs dry cleaning is my tux and formal shirts.
I don’t dry clean any of my business shirts. They go into the washing machine and are dried on the line with the rest of my clothes. Obviously I then iron them.
As for my suits - they get dry cleaned every 2-3 months I suppose. More frequently in summer than in winter.
I’ve handwashed lined summer suits in cold water in a splash tub (a large, deep sink).
Sometimes this is the best option hen you have a stain on light colored fabric - pretreat with your favorite liquid detergent and pour 1/4 cup or so into the tub. Dry cleaners have been known to seriously screw up light colors, creating big bleachy stains when trying to get rid of little ones.