Looking After Your New Suit

It’s often said that the suit is our modern day armor. And with good reason. We put it on, we walk to the office, we run to a lunchtime meeting, we hop onto the bus, we board the train, we sit, we stand, we win clients and close deals.

Day in, day out, we give our suit a thorough workout and it’s essential we give it the care and attention it needs in order to guarantee its longevity.

I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been asked questions like “How long should a suit last?”, “Why has my shirt collar worn out after just a year of wear?”, and “How often should I have my suit dry cleaned?”

But how long is a piece of string? The answer is: however long you want it to be. The same applies to the length of your time you’d like your suit to last. If you have purchased a suit of decent quality (you should have, if you read our previous guides), how long it lasts is largely down to you, how often you wear it, and how you clean and care for it.

Dry Cleaning

Dry cleaning. Pricey if you have it done regularly but essential for keeping your suit in good nick, right?

Wrong. Too many people take their suit to the dry cleaner far too often. Dry cleaning isn’t the elaborate, painstaking and highly beneficial laundering process many of us imagine it to be. In fact, dry cleaning typically involves bunging your clothes into an industrial-sized washing machine and washing them in harsh chemicals that are highly effective in ridding your clothing of unsightly stains, but, unfortunately, can ruin the fibres of the fabric.

Avoid dry cleaning your suits where possible

With excessive exposure, wool (found in most suits) loses its lustre and its fibres begin to break down, resulting in a loss of richness of color and an undesirable shine. This is especially true of suits made from wools of higher micron numbers, which are softer to the touch but also finer and more fragile.