How to Care for Silk So It Outlives You

Silk has an undeserved reputation for fragility. In truth it is one of the most generous fibres a woman can own — strong, resilient, capable of lasting generations — provided you treat it as a living thing rather than as laundry. Almost every silk piece that fails was not worn out; it was washed wrong, dried wrong, or stored wrong. What follows is the protocol we give every client who carries a piece out of the fitting room.

Washing

A silk slip, camisole, knicker or tap pant should be hand-washed, and gentle hand-washing is kinder than repeated dry cleaning, whose solvents dull the fibre over time. Use cool water — never hot, which shocks the protein and can shift the dye. Choose a pH-neutral cleanser; the atelier's quiet standby is a single capful of unscented baby shampoo, mild enough for hair and therefore mild enough for silk. Submerge, swirl gently for no more than three minutes, and do not rub, twist or leave it soaking. Anything with a moulded cup, an underwire channel or a boned corselette panel is a different animal and is treated further down.

“Silk asks to be handled the way you would handle your own hair on a tired evening — cool water, a soft soap, no force, and never wrung.”

The atelier

What ordinary detergent does

This is the part most people are never told. Standard laundry detergent is built around protease enzymes, whose entire function is to break down protein so that it can be rinsed away. Silk is protein. So is the skin oil the detergent was designed to attack, and the machine cannot tell the difference. A silk slip washed three or four times in ordinary detergent does not tear dramatically; it goes quietly dull and thin at the shoulder and the hem, and the change is not reversible. Fabric softener is the second offender: it works by depositing a cationic film, which flattens the refraction that gives silk its shift of colour and leaves a slip looking permanently slightly grey.

Drying

Never wring silk; twisting breaks the long filaments that give it strength and shine. Lay the piece flat on a clean cotton towel, roll the two together to press out the water, then unroll and dry the garment flat in the shade. Direct sun is the enemy — ultraviolet light fades dye and weakens the fibre. And never a tumble dryer: the heat and the tumbling are precisely the two things silk cannot forgive, and heat is also what kills the elastane in every band and edge the piece may carry.

Pressing and storing

• Press from the reverse side, on the silk setting, while the fabric is still slightly damp — silk answers beautifully to a little residual moisture and resists creasing once dry.
• Never let a hot plate touch a bias hem or a lace edge directly; use a cotton press cloth, or the metal will leave a glassy shine along exactly the line the eye goes to.
• Fold slips and camisoles rather than hanging them. A bias-cut piece hung by two thin straps grows a little longer every month, and it never comes back.
• Lay knickers and tap pants flat in a shallow drawer, interleaved with acid-free tissue. Silk against silk in a crowded drawer abrades at the folds.
• Store in breathable cotton, never sealed plastic, which traps moisture and yellows pale silk within a single humid season.
• Against moths, use cedar or dried lavender rather than naphthalene, whose vapours taint the fibre and linger through several washes.

The pieces that are not simply silk

A silk-covered cup with an underwire, a corselette with spiral steel, a longline bra on power mesh — these are constructions, not lengths of cloth, and they want a different hand. Wash them alone, in cool water, cupping the piece rather than compressing it; never fold one cup inside the other, which sets a crease in the foam that no press will lift. Support the wire channel between two fingers as you lift the piece out of the water, because the whole weight of a soaked garment hanging from a wire casing is what eventually works the wire loose at the end. And nothing with a wire ever, under any circumstance, goes near a dryer: the heat softens the casing thread and the wire begins to migrate on the very first cycle.

When something goes wrong

Act on a fresh stain at once, but gently. Blot — never rub — with a clean cloth and cool water; rubbing drives the stain deeper and abrades the surface into a permanent dull patch. Resist the household instinct to reach for hydrogen peroxide, chlorine bleach or an enzyme spray, all of which attack protein fibres and will open a hole in silk as readily as they lift a mark. For oil, a light dusting of talc or cornstarch left to absorb overnight works quietly. Deodorant on an underarm edge lifts with a cool rinse and a drop of white vinegar if you catch it the same day, and becomes permanent if you do not.

Care for silk this way and it repays you across decades, growing softer and more luminous with each gentle wash. The most beautiful silk we have handled came in for repair after forty years of wear — a slip, worn under everything, washed by hand every week of its life. It had not survived in spite of being worn. It had become beautiful because of it.