Bespoke runs through the veins of Will Boehlke,
style consultant, speaker and author of the widely followed,
award-winning blog, A Suitable Wardrobe.
On March 18, 2009, Will addressed the issue of the care and
feeding of fine garments in a post titled Maintenance: Clothing Cleaners.
Here's what he had to say ...
"There are 26,000 clothing cleaners in the United States. Most
of them will quickly destroy bespoke clothing.
Clothes cleaning is a business driven by the desire to turn
garments around quickly, and at the lowest possible cost.
Unfortunately, those objectives are at odds with quality cleaning
of bespoke clothing where, for example, the best way to remove soil
from a shirt is to soak it. Soaking and same day service are
completely incompatible.
In San Francisco we have a high profile cleaner that for many
years was voted best in the Bay area. Prices are very high, and
clothing is returned in more packaging than it had when it was new.
And yet, shirts are returned with dirt ground into the cuffs and
jacket lapels pressed so that the collar no longer sits properly.
Fortunately there are alternatives.
Serious clothing requires a serious commitment to
clothing care. I've written in the past that San Francisco men once
sent their laundry by clipper ship to China to have it hand cleaned
and returned. And as recently as twenty years ago the now defunct
haberdasher Sulka offered a laundry by mail service for bespoke
shirts.
Laundry by mail is still a viable alternative but men in
eighteen cities in Australia and North America may not need to go
that far. The members of Leading Cleaners Internationale meet the
cleaning industry's only rigorous standards for quality. Each of
them treats every garment as if it is a museum-quality textile.
And for those of us who don't live in one of those eighteen
locations but do live in North America, there is RAVE
FabriCARE's clean by mail service. I have only used the service
for shirts but the results were outstanding.
There are 26,000 clothing cleaners in the United States. A few
of them actually know how to treat clothing properly."
Addendum to this post from RAVE: Will uses our services for dry
cleaning, sponge and press, and shirt laundry.
How can I help you?