Clothing care

Abstract

Caring includes various activities that are undertaken to sustain ourselves, other people, objects, as well as the environment in our everyday lives. We take good care of what we value and cherish. This applies to clothes, things, and people. Care of clothing encompasses various practices such as how we touch, wear, store, and hang up our clothes and how we air, wash, repair, and assess them. Clothing is used to show care, for example, when dressing children, but also when we select clothing to safeguard ourselves and our bodies. Of the techniques for the care of clothing, washing is in a special position. It not only helps to extend the life of the clothes and make them usable again and again but washing has a significant environmental impact. Washing less and better requires knowledge and a bit of planning. So do the techniques that exist to extend clothing’s service life and usability, such as repair, sewing, redesign, or putting clothes to use in new ways. All these aspects are influenced by the value we give to these garments. In working towards more sustainable clothing consumption, we need to buy fewer clothes and use what we have more. This requires more care—both understood concretely as washing and repair, but also in a wider sense that we appreciate and thus also “care for clothes” we have.