Woven woolen fabrics need a couple of dry cleanings per year unless you're:
-rough on your clothes;
-wear each item more than 5 times a week every week and don't give them time to hang properly and breathe and thereby the chance to regain their intended shape which the structure of wool’s cells naturally allows for. This is called ‘resilience’ and wool does this best of all fibres used in clothing;
-sleep and perspire in them which stretches them out of shape at the knees, elbows and neck; or
-you have a stain that you can't get out with an ordinary BAR of pure Ivory soap dry-rubbed onto a dampened clean cloth and the stain then rubbed delicately with one or two fingers behind the cloth just until the stain is out. (Note: don’t try this on silk. It just makes the stain larger and allows the dry cleaner to charge you even more.)
Dry cleaning ages even top quality woven woolens by a year’s worth of wearing each time you do it. Even an expensive suit can look like a rag long before it ought to. This is because harsh cleaning removes the natural-occurring lanolin left in wool after factory scouring removes almost all of it so as not to gook up the looms.
By dry cleaning wool pants every second wearing, there is nowhere in the world the OP could afford the dry cleaning he thinks he needs unless he were extremely wealthy or compromised on fun things. Perhaps he wears only white wool and silk in which case cleaning after just 2 wearings sounds about right. Dry cleaning in BA costs about half to a third of what it does in London or Canada even with Argentine inflation. (I don't know about the US.)
Here's what needs to be dry cleaned: woven wool fabrics, many woven silk fabrics (especially cheap silk because this is not pre-shrunk); items that are lined with a fabric different from the main one; items printed with more than one colour in a large-sized pattern; and almost always anything dyed red because this colour whatever its price, quality or dye is an extremely elusive colour. It bleeds straight into water immediately and fades if a garment is left in water for longer than 2 minutes. Also black and white combos in one item can be more likely to be ruined due to the strength of that contrast. The black seeps into the white at its edges.
Someone here mentioned dry cleaning duvets. If the duvet is made of down, especially very fine goose down, follow label instructions and call the manufacturer if necessary or see its website. Generally, it’s advised not to clean (ie. dry clean) a goose down duvet more than once every 5 or 10 years. Down is delicate. All liquid soaking of it breaks it and can turn it into a near-powder. Decorative duvet covers are always removable for the reason that they can be washed as needed and so protect the duvet. All a down duvet itself needs is to be hung to air once a year and then be shaken. But if you’re using an American ‘quilt’ (sometimes mistakenly called a ‘duvet’ but also another name which I forget), it’s usually made of synthetic fibres and its cover is not removable. Follow its cleaning directions.
Most knitted (not woven) wool or cotton items - hats, scarves, gloves and sweaters can be hand-washed in a sink or large bowl using 1-3 teaspoons of the Argentine equivalent of Woolite (it's okay, safe - I've used it –if only they made it less perfumed, though), rinsed in clean water twice by squeezing the garment gently and not twisting it much; placed on a thick towel on the floor if necessary for a day or two and turned over once halfway through drying. When you spread it on the towel, tighten ribbed cuffs, hems, and necks of sweaters to very tiny with your fist; pat the sleeves into shape and make the whole item lie flat but DON'T stretch any part of it. This will take you no more than 10 minutes from start to finish for a large thick sweater and it costs nothing except for cold to lukewarm water! It would take you more time to walk twice to the cleaners and back. Washing makes wool knits retain their softness for years. Dry cleaning immediately hardens a wool sweater and makes it appear lifeless and limp.
So much American-sold clothing is labelled "Dry clean only" - far more often than clothing made in Europe is. Manufacturing in China was first responsible for this and so this happened a good 10 years earlier in the US than in Europe. Still now, you'll find plenty of European-made garments whose care instructions are more varied. This saves me money on dry cleaning. The benefit of "dryclean only" labelling, in addition to reducing manufacturers’ liability for shoddy textiles as someone else has mentioned, is that clothing manufacturers well know that dry cleaning wears out clothes. That label assures them that you'll be buying more clothes much sooner.
Regarding shrinkage, Chinese silk fabrics has always been known to shrink. Textile producers there roll the woven fabrics onto tubes. As they roll it, they stretch it quite strenuously to get 8-9% more yardage from it. That’s the traditional shrinkage ratio of these. Chinese retailers and a manufacturer I used to use in Taiwan told me this. I‘ve tested that percentage by pre-shrinking retailed Chinese textiles off rolls myself. If you want good silk that you can almost always hand-wash with less than 1% shrinkage (a natural and miniscule amount), buy silk made in Italy by an established and reputable textile mill.
As the guys already know, you cannot wash a woven tie regardless of how much or little you paid for it. Only ever dry clean ties! Woven fabric ties are cut on the diagonal from fabric, not horizontally and vertically in the directions in which the fabric was woven on looms and is meant to hang. That's why ties take a knot so smoothly and lie flat without curling up at their ends. This characteristic of bendability by cutting the fabric 'on the bias', however, weakens the fabric's ability to hold its shape once it's been weighted at all with water. Water distorts the fabric’s grain by causing the fibres now hanging diagonally to stretch in keeping with gravity. The fabric doesn’t want to sit diagonally.The grain is now permanently distorted. Ergo, puckering and waving if you try to wash a tie.
Here's a tip for anyone who may decide to resettle in North America. BEWARE OF THIS. Some drycleaners here are using some new environmental cleaning methods. At least one of the two of these methods I've come across substitutes dry cleaning fluid with water. You’re paying dry cleaning prices now to have your clothes only washed now at better, trendier cleaners here that can afford to switch methods! Last year, I had some clothes dry cleaned at the same time at the cleaners I always use here. They didn’t tell customers they were now using a new method nor one employing water. Fortunately, my husband forgot to take his best Italian wool suit to the cleaners that day.
Every pair of my pants came back with a 3-4” smaller waist and the legs 2-3” shorter from crotch to ankle and another 1.5” shorter from waist to crotch. When I complained, the cleaners told me to tell them how much they should now stretch each garments at its waist, hip, thigh, knee, and in length to get them back to what they were. I would have needed to know the original measurements known only to the designers to be able to do that! “We’re stretching things for free all the time now”, they said. It took me 8 hours back at home comparing a dozen measurements on each item they ruined with dozens more from items in my closet to get the figures they needed and that might be right. Then I had to bring to them complex written directions and the clothes they ruined. When I told them it was not sustainable to make customers do this, they casually told me this is what we all have to do now to save the environment!!
This is like asking someone who’s hired and paid for a remis to EZE to push it all the way there and then smile graciously. I live in a good area. This has happened to many people around me who probably adore this planet just as much as this cleaners' does. But like me, they are now providing the cheap cleaner’s a block away a roaring trade. He could probably afford to switch methods too now but he won’t be.
There seems to be a lot of tweaking going on with these new methods. So watch out. Woven wools and lined garments or anything made of 2 or more fabrics should never be put into water! ‘5 a Sec’ in BA was definitely not using this new method in December. Only North America could afford such a brainless and hassling ‘improvement’.
I hate to see people lose money for no good reason. There are ways to keep your clothes clean and in perfect condition without ruining them, going broke, or resorting to polyester and now worse, “Modal”, the new sleazy substitute for cotton that loses the little shape it has within a few hours of wearing and that can't be regained. Thankfully, I haven’t found this invention being used in Argentina yet. There are surprisingly thus 2 advantages to those fierce Argentine import restrictions. You don't have to submit to Modal nor experimental methods of destroying your clothes there. I'd opt for '5 a Sec' over what's being passed off here as 'advanced', wonderful and exciting, I swear.
