Eli5, Why can’t suits be washed in the washing machine?
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I’m a former suit salesmen. It depends on the kind of suit you’re talking about. I’ve sold everything from high street (€100) to Tom Ford (€6,000)
Cotton or linen?
You can machine wash them. You just need to put them on a very delicate wash and make sure you shape them as you dry them. If you have a shaping hanger, this helps. It literally looks kinda like a torso. These are usually unlined suits so they don’t have any real structure to them.
Wool or wool blend?
Literally no need to machine wash them, sponging and pressing will get most stains out of them. Wool is durable. No need to even dry clean most of them. If you ask your dry cleaner to sponge and press instead, the suit will thank you for it. Unless you’re a sweat monster when you’re wearing them, then do the suit a favour.
However, on more expensive suits there is a structure underneath the suit, it’s usually made out of horse hair and it’s really delicate. You can actually damage this just by folding it wrong or leaning on it in a weird way but you absolutely don’t want to get it wet. Now the weight of the fabric of your suit will determine how much you need to worry about getting wet. On the lighter fabrics, you basically don’t even want someone breathing heavily near you but on the heavier tweeds etc, it’s all good. A horse could piss on you and the structure would be fine. The fabric might be a bit fucked though.
The shoulder structure is an absolute mess when you see it without lining and fabric around it. If you have ever seen the inside of a mattress or sofa, that’s what it looks like. The tailors do all the fancy stitching where you can see it but where it doesn’t matter they are like “fuck it whatever”.
You can machine wash suit trousers. I do it all the time. It’s just the jackets that you have to be careful with.
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