Receiving nice, new dress shirts as gifts can help freshen up your wardrobe and save you the expense of buying new shirts yourself. To keep your favorite dress shirts looking fresh and crisp for a good long time, it’s important to take proper care of them and utilize professional dry cleaning services when necessary. With the right cleaning, tailoring and ironing, your dress shirts can keep their brand new looking shape and feel for several years.
How professional cleaning benefits dress shirts
Although you can wash certain types of dress shirts at home, if you don’t follow the label instructions correctly, you can prematurely wear out the fabric, ruin the shirt’s shape and not properly remove discoloration, soil and stains. If you don’t remove certain stains and discoloration, they grow worse over time and can damage the shirt. When you take your dress shirt to a professional dry cleaner, they can detect and remove stains and remove them before they ruin the shirt.
Professional laundering
A majority of dress shirts consist of a cotton or cotton/polyester blend of fabric that is safe for laundering at home or professionally. Professional laundering removes spots and stains you may miss at home and uses specially designed cleaners, additives and finishes you can’t find for home use. Pre-treating stains at home can damage your shirt if you’re not careful, whereas professional cleaners may use steam and a spot solution to remove the stain safely from the fabric. Professional cleaners have the right equipment and knowledge to handle all types of fabrics and remove a variety of stains.
Professional dry cleaning
Not all dress shirts are cotton or cotton blends. Some dress shirts are made of more delicate fabrics such as silk that aren’t safe for home laundering. Silk does best when it’s dry cleaned or professional wet cleaned as water can cause issues with silk and acetate such as bleeding dyes and stains. Dry cleaning more delicate dress shirts use liquid solvents instead of water, and that solvent helps dissolve oils and grease from the garment. Dry cleaning prevents fading, shrinking and changes in the fabric, which extends the life of the dress shirt and preserves its shape. If you ever have any doubts about how to clean a dress shirt, it’s a good idea to take it to a professional cleaner who can properly care for the specific fabric.
Along with dry cleaning pickup and drop-off services, Embassy Cleaners offers professional ironing and tailoring to ensure that your dress shirts continue looking their best through all seasons.