Everything that destroys good clothes, ranked

Garments rarely fail from being worn. They fail from being maintained badly, and the failures are so consistent across wardrobes that they can be put in order. Here is the order.

One: heat

Protein fibres, which is wool, cashmere, silk and hair, are held in shape by bonds that relax in hot water and reset in whatever shape the garment happens to be in. That is felting, and it is not reversible. Thirty degrees is the ceiling, twenty is better, and a tumble dryer is simply a machine for doing this quickly while also abrading the surface.

Cotton and linen survive heat but lose it in other ways: repeated hot washing breaks down the finish and the elastane in any blend, which is why a shirt with four per cent stretch goes baggy at the elbow after a year of sixty degree washes and a pure cotton one does not.

Two: friction

Pilling is fibre ends migrating to the surface and tangling. It happens fastest where a garment rubs against itself or against something else: underarms, the inside of sleeves, the line a bag strap crosses, the back of a jumper against a chair. Short fibre pills faster, but everything pills eventually.

The mitigation is rotation. Two days of wear then a day off lets the fibres recover, which slows the migration considerably. The repair is a comb, gently, in one direction. Never a razor, which shears the pill off along with a layer of the surface and guarantees the next one arrives sooner.

Three: solvent

Dry cleaning is a mild chemical assault that removes soil and also removes the natural oils and some of the finishing. Twice a season on a coat is maintenance. Twice a month is slow destruction, and it is the reason a jacket worn daily and cleaned monthly looks tired in two years while one cleaned twice a year looks fine in eight.

Most of what people send to the cleaner needs airing instead. A jacket hung overnight in a bathroom after a shower, or simply outside on a dry day, loses almost all of the odour it collected. Spot treatment handles the rest. Send the whole garment only when the whole garment is dirty.

Airing is free, takes one night, and does ninety per cent of what a cleaner does to a garment worn once.

Four: the wrong hanger, and the right one

• Knitwear goes flat in a drawer, folded at the sides so the fold falls where nobody looks. On a hanger it grows shoulders within a season.
• Jackets and coats want a shaped wooden hanger at least as wide as the shoulder, which spreads the weight instead of concentrating it on two points.
• Trousers hang from the hem, upside down, which lets gravity pull the creases out rather than in.
• Nothing wants a wire hanger, including the shirts that come home on them.

Five: storage, and the actual enemy in it

Clothes moths eat keratin, which means wool, cashmere and silk, and they do it in the dark and the still. They are not deterred by cedar, whatever the marketing says: cedar oil repels larvae weakly for a few months and then the block is a piece of wood. What works is cleaning before storage, because larvae feed on the soil and the salt rather than the clean fibre, and sealed containers for anything going away for a season.

Damp is the second storage enemy and it works faster. Anything above about sixty five per cent relative humidity in a dark wardrobe will eventually produce mildew in leather and cotton alike. Air the wardrobe, do not pack it solid, and do not store anything against an outside wall in an old building.

What this is worth

A wardrobe maintained on these rules lasts roughly twice as long as one that is not, which halves the cost per wear of everything in it. It costs a drawer, a set of decent hangers, a comb and about ten minutes a week, and it is the highest return available anywhere in dressing.

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