3 Things To Know About Your Dress Clothes

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If you wear dress clothes on a regular basis, it is helpful to understand what causes your dress clothing to get worn out, stained and wrinkled. Here are three things that you should know about how your dress clothes are made and how they will wear down over time. 

#1 Pinstripes Wear Out

If you like to wear pinstripe shirts, it is important to realize that the pinstripes will not last forever. Generally, pinstripes are made by adding specific colored yarn or thread to your shirt. This yarn or thread is dyed using either sulfur based dyes or fiber-reactive dyes. Both of these types of dyes tend to break down over time. After so many washes, as your shirt reaches the end of its life, the pinstripes will break down and wash away.

#2 Underarm Stains Get Worse With Time

Underarm stains can be one of the biggest culprits of breaking down your dress shirts. If your perspiration is allowed to sit on your shirt for an extended period of time, you sweat will stain the shirt and it will also cause the fabric in the armpit area to become weakened over time.

Additionally, although wearing antiperspirants make you smell better when you sweat, they don't do any favors to your dress shirts. Many antiperspirants contain aluminum chlorides, which help you not sweat so much, but can damage and weaken the fabric in the armpit area of your dress shirts.

The best way to fight against underarm stains is to wash your clothing as soon after you wear it as possible so the sweat stains do not compromise your fabric. Over a long period of time though, those sweat stains are going to eventually damage the underarm area of your favorite shirts.

#3 Shirts Shrink Because Of Manufacture Defects

If you have a shirt that shrinks after the first time you wash it, it is because the manufacture did not use pre-shrunk fabric. Your shirts should not significantly change shape after they are washed if they are constructed correctly.

Additionally, if you cuffs and collar of your shirt start to shrink over time or look really wrinkled, it is because the outer fabric differed from the inner fabric in construction when it was made, causing one part of your shirt to shrink more than the other.

Shrinking of your shirts is almost always because of manufacturing quality issues and rarely has anything to do with laundering, assuming the directions on the tag of the shirt were followed.

If you want to get the most mileage as possible out of your dress clothes, take them to a qualified dry cleaners to have them washed for you. 

For dry cleaning, contact a company such as Country Squire Cleaners.


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