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Fall arrived this morning — officially, on the calendar — and in Montreal the wardrobe follows the calendar quickly. Sweaters are coming down from top shelves all over the city this week. Some will emerge from summer storage exactly as they went in. Others will come out with a mysterious hole near the collar, felted cuffs, or a constellation of pills along the ribs. Nearly every one of those casualties traces back to the same few habits, so before the season begins in earnest, here is what we tell clients at the counter about how to wash a cashmere sweater — and everything else good knitwear asks of you. It is less than you think.
One position up front, because it surprises people: we would rather you never dry clean a sweater. Dry cleaning exists for tailoring — canvas, shoulder structure, the things water would disturb. A knit has none of that. What it has is fibre, and the solvent in a dry cleaning machine strips the natural oils out of cashmere and fine merino a little more with each visit, leaving the hand drier and the colour duller. Washed properly at home, cashmere does the opposite: it blooms, relaxes, and gets softer with age. The most beautiful sweaters that pass through our fitting room are ten years old and have never met a dry cleaner.
First, the September inspection
Before anything gets worn, look at each knit in daylight. Check the collar, the underarms, and the hem — moths favour the places where a little of the wearer is left in the wool, which is also why a sweater should never go into storage unwashed. If you find one hole, check every knit in the pile; moths are rarely solitary. Caught small, a hole in a fine-gauge knit can be rewoven almost invisibly. Caught in December, it has usually laddered.
Then air everything for a day — flat, near an open window, not on a hanger. A hanger will put peaks in the shoulders of a knit in a single afternoon and stretch the body by evening. It is why every sweater in our store lives folded on a table, including the Stenströms oatmeal cashmere crew we brought in for this fall. Gravity is patient. Fold.
How to wash a cashmere sweater at home
Less often than you think, and more gently. A knit worn over a shirt does not need washing after every wear; it needs air and a rest. Every fifth or sixth wear is plenty, sooner only if it has earned it. When the day comes: lukewarm water in a clean sink, a capful of a no-rinse wool wash or, in a pinch, baby shampoo — never detergent, whose enzymes are designed to digest protein, which is precisely what cashmere is. Five minutes of gentle squeezing, never wringing. Press the water out against the side of the sink, roll the sweater in a towel and press again, then dry it flat on a rack, reshaped by hand.
And here is the Montreal clause: not on the radiator, not near the radiator, not draped over the baseboard because the baseboard was convenient. Heat is how a fifty-two becomes a forty-eight. Radiator season and sweater season arrive together in this city, and they should never touch.
Pilling is friction, not failure
Pills form where the fabric rubs — under the arms, at the hip where a bag strap sits, at the left wrist against a watch. Longer, finer fibres pill less, which is part of what you pay for in a pure cashmere knit; we said our piece on fibre quality earlier this month and stand by it. But every knit pills somewhere, and the remedy is a cashmere comb used lightly on a dry sweater — never a razor, which cuts the very fibres you paid for and invites more pilling, not less.
The better prevention is rest. Wool has a memory, and given forty-eight hours between wears a knit will shed odour, recover its shape, and pill noticeably less. Two sweaters worn in rotation will outlast three worn carelessly. If your week is hard on knitwear — a laptop bag, a commute, a car coat over top — a wool-cashmere blend like Gran Sasso's navy half-zip takes the abrasion of a workweek more gracefully than pure cashmere, which is exactly why we buy both.
Bring us the hard cases
Some problems belong to a professional: the moth hole discovered too late, the cuff that met a rough desk edge all winter, the crew neck that came out of storage a size smaller than it went in. Bring it by the store on Decarie Boulevard and we will give you an honest verdict — some sweaters are worth rescuing and some have simply retired, and we will tell you which is which. If the pile came out of storage thinner than you remembered, the sweater wall is at its fullest right now, this being the first week of fall. And if you would rather talk it through in person, book a visit — we will happily spend twenty minutes on the care of a sweater we sold you years ago. That is rather the point of the place.
