Vintage Care – Tips from a Textile and Vintage Nerd

Collector and singer Mouna Stone started buying vintage at 16. These days she mostly wears pieces from the 20s and 40s. She learned to sew and mend early on, and clothes maintenance is now her favourite chore.

“It sounds quirky, but I really am a nerd for caring for vintage. I look at cleaning as a witchy enterprise and quite enjoy the wash day.”

Mouna recommends starting with the least drastic methods: airing out, sunshine, spot cleaning. Washing the garment should be your last option.

“Enjoy the process and know that you’ve added value to a garment that might not have been able to be worn anymore without your careful cleaning and mending.”

Here are her tried and tested tips.

Read old books and magazines

I collect books and paraphernalia about cleaning from the 20s to the 50s. Old magazines are full of sewing, mending and cleaning tips. They often mention products you can’t buy any more, so I research a non-toxic modern equivalent.

There are some fabulous books I‘d recommend getting your hands on — even just to make your modern clothes last longer. A lot of people have lost the art of caring for textiles.

Completely Spotless by Shannon Lush and Jennifer Fleming is a compendium of how to launder, repair and remove stains from almost every textile imaginable. The war-time manual Make Do and Mend is another favorite of mine. It was published by the British government to encourage people to get as much wear as possible out of the clothes they already had.

Air and mend

Before I wash anything, I try other tricks first. First off, I air things out. After I’ve worn something, I hang it up overnight. The next day I’ll check it – does it smell musty, or can it go straight back in the wardrobe?

I do the little things – button it up, do up the hooks and eyes, check the zip – so I know everything works before it goes away. It’s an important step: it means the piece is ready to wear next time, and that’s when you notice if something has come loose or broken. Remember the saying ‘a stitch in time saves nine’ – mend it now before it gets worse!

Getting rid of smells

Bicarb soda (baking soda) is an effective, non-invasive way to lift odours without wetting a delicate piece. Place a cup of soda and the smelly garment inside a sealed bag and leave for a few days. I once did this to remove cigarette odour from a 1930s coat. I also just hung it in some sunshine for a few days and it worked perfectly.

You can use pure vodka in a spray bottle to spritz the armpits very carefully and leave it to hang and see if that eliminates any odour and bacteria before putting it back into your closet – this is a trick I used regularly when I worked in theatre.

Just be sure to use a good quality (low sugar) vodka. The alcohol will help kill bacteria causing smells and will evaporate. It should be gentle enough for most fibres.

If a clothing item smells musty, pop a teabag into the soap dispenser as the machine fills up!

Spot treatment

If I need to spot clean, I first try to identify the stain – is it protein, fat, or something else?

If the stain is protein-based – dairy, for example – I froth up suds in the sink with dishwashing liquid or a mild soap, and use only the suds. Dip the end of a clean white cloth in the suds and work from the outside of the stain towards the centre, then blot the moisture back up and start again. Keep going until the area looks clean, rinse the area, then hang it to dry.

It’s like carpet shampooing – you wet one small area, lift the water and debris back out, then blot the rest dry. Nothing gets too wet, and you can stay focused on one small patch.

And place a dry white towel inside the garment – it stops the water and the stain penetrating through to the back, and it slows the bleed.

An old technique to remove stubborn stains is to use salts of lemon which is no longer available. You can mix a modern substitute by mixing a paste of half a lemon and a teaspoon of salt. Carefully apply the paste on the stain and leave in the sun to dry. Brush off the salts. Hopefully the combo of the sun, salt and lemon juice will lighten that area.

Washing the knits

It is best to wash vintage knits by hand. After the wash, put a white towel fully inside the garment, wrap the whole thing in another towel and roll it a few times gently to remove excess moisture.

Lay the knit flat in the shade to dry — that part matters for two reasons: Knits (especially woollen ones) can shrink if dried too quickly with heat. That’s why you should always wash knits in lukewarm or cold water. Secondly, the water weighs the garments down and they can stretch out of shape if not dried flat.

You can even pin a shrunken knit after washing and carefully stretch it to regain the original shape.

Wash similar colours together

If a garment gets to the point where I actually need to wash it and it’s safe to wash (so it doesn’t have diamantés, rhinestones, or sequins etc), I save up a few garments that are similar colour and fibre to wash them together. I never put red garments in the wash with other colours or silk with other garments as silk colors tend to run easily.

I always test the garment’s colourfastness when I first get it. I dampen an inconspicuous spot – under the arm, say – then press a white cloth to it and see whether any dye transfers.

When a new garment joins my collection (especially red, deep blue or deep black), I hand-wash it by itself if I’m unsure of the colourfastness. I start with cool water and slowly add warmer – the dye will run pretty quickly if it’s not colourfast. This is where having white vinegar or table salt on hand helps as salt helps set the dye on fibres like cotton, linen, rayon, viscose, and bamboo. Vinegar is great, too, but mostly for silk and wool.

Synthetic fibres like polyester and nylon are usually colourfast but sometimes there is overdye when the manufacturer didn’t rinse out the last of the dye.

Machine wash

If I do use the machine, everything goes into washing bags – a few pieces per bag, about three bags in a load. I add one or two clean white towels to take the shock out of the tumbling.

I use the gentle cycle, a very mild detergent or wool wash, and the lowest spin. Sometimes I even stop the machine part-way through the spin and let things finish drying flat or on the line.

I never wash my silks in the machine.

Be careful with soaking

Some fibres should never go into a soaker solution or oxygen bleach – rayon and viscose especially, because it breaks the fibres down. It’s really important not to go crazy soaking in anything like that.

Soaking silk can pull a lot of the dye out. A mild detergent or baby shampoo is safer, and it keeps the moisture and lustre in the fibres.

Never steam or wash gelatin sequins. As the name suggests, sequins from the 20s to the 40s are made from actual gelatin, and they’ll melt with any heat or moisture. Metal zips and fastenings can rust, so don’t soak them for more than an hour, and dry them thoroughly.

Avoid dry cleaners

When you take something to a dry cleaner, technically they’re not doing anything dry. They’re just not using a huge amount of water – but they are using a lot of chemicals. They don’t always understand vintage fibres, and they can damage your clothes without meaning to: melting cellulose buttons or gelatin sequins, for example. So I do all my own washing and spot treatments.

There are some dry cleaners that specialize in vintage, but I don’t want to risk a mishap. There’s no garment I wouldn’t clean myself.

Storing

I only hang my fairly strong vintage items like jackets, suits, and sundresses with sturdy shoulders. Everything else is better folded. For delicate items, I recommend acid-free tissue or old sewing pattern paper – some sewing shops discard these at the end of a season. Or you can make cotton hanger bags or protective wraps out of unbleached cotton calico — that’s what museums use. Some people sew a clear pocket on the front, with a photo of the garment in it.