It feels like only yesterday when you were last loading the washing machine with a huge pile of laundry, and yet here you are again. It’s an exhausting weekly chore that feels as though it never ends. Basket to washer, washer to drying rack, drying rack to bedroom drawers. Over and over again. But does it really have to be this way?
Well, no. A few years back, I changed my approach to laundry. Friends are often shocked when I tell them how rarely I load the machine, but I always ask them: do my clothes ever look dirty? Do I ever smell dirty? Would you have been able to tell how little I use the washing machine if I hadn’t told you? Invariably their answer to all three of these questions is no.
According to a 2018 survey, most people in Britain will wear their T-shirts only twice before washing them. Plenty of people I know seem to wash them after only one wear. How many wears before I throw them in the machine meanwhile? Honestly, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. It depends on a whole range of factors – what the weather is like, whether I’m doing any strenuous exercise, or whether I spill a big dollop of spag bol down myself at dinner. If I’m not sure if a T-shirt is clean enough to wear, I rely on a method as old as civilisation itself: the sniff test.
I sniff my clothes every morning. A delicate, hesitant sniff isn’t good enough. You have to really go for it; really inhale the armpits of your T-shirts. Only then will you have the evidence you need. If the T-shirt stinks, of course I throw it in the washer. But if it smells neutral, or even carries just the faint whiff of deodorant, it’s safe to wear again.
Too many people up and down the country are washing their clothes after one or two wears just out of habit. But I prefer to think of laundry like you might think about washing your car. If your Fiat 500 seemed clean, you wouldn’t take it to the car wash, no matter how long it had been. You’d wait until it seemed a bit mucky. Why should your shirts, blouses and dresses be any different?
Doing laundry always carries risks too – according to a 2021 study, 95 items of clothing will be ruined over the average adult’s lifetime as a result of accidentally washing colours with whites or running the machine on too high a temperature. But even if you never make these errors of judgement, you’re damaging your clothes gradually every single time you run a cycle.
“Washing clothes regularly wears down the fibres and can cause them to degrade more quickly,” explains independent clothing designer Cath Fleming. “Dyed garments can lose their colour through over-washing, cotton often shrinks in a 40-degree wash, and wool is its own fussy beast.”
Despite these factors, you’re going to need to wash your clothes eventually, but limiting the amount of times you do so can extend the life expectancy of your garments – and help save the planet.