Dark, DARK slacks may have
been the fashion for reasons
other than you might guess
A century and a half ago, cleaners didn’t really clean. In fact, people brought wrinkled and soiled clothes not to a dry cleaner, but to a steam shop. As the name implies, steam shops steamed away wrinkles.
And stain removal? There wasn’t much of that to speak of. When you brought in a stained garment, the steam shop simply dyed the fabric a darker shade. There was a tacit agreement among steamers and their customers to act as if this hid the stain, even though it seldom really did. If later on you later showed up with another stain, they dyed the garment even darker. Next time, darker still. And so forth.
Since dying was a common practice, we doubt that it fooled anyone into believing that a very, VERY dark charcoal gray suit was in fact new and stain-free. We must wonder, however, if the practice explains why extremely dark gray and navy suits became and remained the business standard for so many years.
All of that was before Prestige Cleaners’ time. When we opened our doors, professional laundering and dry cleaning were well-established sciences. We keep up on advances in those sciences as they occur. Even though staining your clothing is not something we’d advise going out of your way to do, rest assured that when stains happen we’ll be ready for you.
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