Walking past SK Vintage in Kentish Town with 10 minutes to spare, I popped in to say hello and see what was new. No, I’m not looking for anything, I said as I plucked a black cocktail dress off the rail; just browsing. This dress was long-sleeved, with a crossover bodice and spectacular beaded fringing at the hem. The label said Bellville Sassoon, no size indicated. “Try it,” owner Sarah Khan urged. “You never know.”
It was divine: an internal zipped skirt that hugged everything just-so; a deep (but still on the right side of saucy) V-neckline; that fringe — it swished and clacked around my thighs as I checked all angles in the full-length mirror. Of course I bought it. How could I not? I was off to Paris in two days; coming across the ultimate dinner-in-Paris dress with this timing felt too serendipitous and right to do anything else.
The dress and I had a marvellous time in Paris, wine spills and all. The day after returning to London, I took it to my dry cleaner. I pointed out the beaded fringe and asked the cleaner if he thought it would be OK. He noted that since there were no care instructions on the tag, he’d clean it as a delicate item.
You can guess what happened next. I arrived to collect the dress and the cleaner sucked his teeth. He went into the back (ominous) and brought out a mound of fabric — my dress — with both hands. Laying it across the counter, he showed me that all the plastic beads had melted and stuck to the fringe, creating a hard, sticky web. “I told you cleaning was at your own risk,” he said as I stood there in minor shock. I asked too few questions and received unsatisfying-to-defensive answers. I knew it was time to leave when I started to cry.
I’m not the only person with an emotional attachment to clothes to go through this. Practically everyone has a story about a time when a coat came back with mysterious splotches or a delicate blouse was too aggressively pressed. A stylist still mourns an Alessandro Michele-era Gucci shirt with an exaggerated collar that somehow melted and shrunk in the cleaning process. There have been missing fabric belts; oil-slick stains on suede; felted blankets. Biro is a recurring theme: a yellow dress or white blouse that came back with a slash of pen across the chest, as if someone had been startled while writing a ticket.
Then there are the times when interventions are well-intentioned but misguided. An editor I know still shudders when she talks about how cleaners ironed out all the micropleats in her mother’s Issey Miyake dress, not realising the brand’s signature pleating was intentional. “They said it had taken a long time,” she recalls. “My mum couldn’t bring herself to tell them.”
Knowing others had been similarly afflicted didn’t help when I lay awake in bed at 2am, feeling like an irresponsible dress owner. When you buy vintage, you aren’t just acquiring an item of clothing; you’re agreeing to be a custodian of a rare piece. In this I had failed. Waves of disappointment washed over me: about the wasted expense of the dress and the impossibility of fixing it.
“I’m sorry that happened to you,” says Mathilde Blanc, co-founder and chief executive of Blanc, the eco-friendly London dry cleaning group that works with Christian Dior, Prada and Gucci, as well as operating four retail locations (I wish I’d taken my dress to one of them). “Mishaps do occur because you’re looking at an industry that has no way of standardising any process.”
Dry cleaning, she explains, is a misnomer. In standard dry cleaning, clothes are loaded into a machine and covered with a viscous solvent derived from petroleum, then heated to 80 degrees; the liquid is then evaporated at a very high temperature, lifting dirt and stains with it.
Without a care tag, “there’s no indication for the experts to know what to do with your garment. So it’s a matter of experimenting, and sometimes experimenting goes wrong.”
Blanc says that when her team thinks cleaning a garment may be risky, they decline to accept it. “My advice would be to avoid cleaning anything special as much as possible. Unless it’s incredibly smelly or stained, in which case ozone technology [a gentle technique that uses ozone gas to clean and remove odours] is brilliant to refresh and sanitise the item.”
Then again, not every garment that calls for dry cleaning actually requires it. Frej Lewenhaupt, co-founder and chief executive of Steamery, the Scandinavian textile-care brand, says: “A lot of clothing manufacturers put ‘dry clean only’ on the tag because they don’t want to take full responsibility for how to actually clean it in your own household.”
Cashmere, for example, can be handwashed cold in delicate detergent and flat-dried at home. He says that with suitable detergents and wash-protection bags, and “a little bit of extra knowledge about textile composition, washing and drying, it’s just as efficient to take care of clothes in your home environment”.
That can also be the gentler option with regard to the environment. “Dry cleaners don’t always have the knowledge of how to treat their leftover chemicals,” Lewenhaupt adds, and when not disposed of properly, these can pose a danger to fish and aquatic life.
But back to the damage. Citizens Advice says that anyone can claim compensation if belongings are damaged or lost in a dry cleaner’s care, and most chains have procedures in place to resolve customer disputes. When it comes to the small, independent businesses that represent the majority of high-street dry cleaners, it’s less clear-cut — cleaners might deny responsibility, as in my situation, or offer free cleaning services as recompense. And realistically, not many people really want to take on a dispute with a local business over an item of clothing.
So most rue the day they walked into that dry cleaner and move on. Not me. I went to V V Rouleaux, the Marylebone ribbon and trimmings emporium, carrying the carcass of the dress. No beaded fringe in stock. There was nothing similar at MacCulloch & Wallis on Poland Street either, but a fashion student who worked there brought out plain black fringing and beads to show me how I could create my own beaded tassels. It would be painstaking as well as expensive. I took a 10cm length of fringe but gave up five minutes into a YouTube tutorial.
Then, a miracle: After a week of searching, I found a twin of my dress on eBay. Too small for me to wear, but it did have the same embellished fringe. A tailor Khan referred me to said she could lift the fringe and use it to replace the damaged material on my dress. Could I really bear to cannibalise another dress to save my own, I asked myself as I tapped to buy. Yes. Yes, I could.
Now the dress is hanging in my wardrobe, with no visible sign of its misadventures. I know I won’t get that lucky twice. Next time it needs to be cleaned, I’ll take it to a specialist or cold-wash it on a delicate setting at home. A good dress is a terrible thing to waste.
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