What does care mean?

Welcome to our little universe, where we want to share our ideas and knowledge of how to care, upcycle and prolong the life of our beautiful garments!

Each and every item you have and will have in the future has come a long way to join you for your life adventure. With some garments you will fall in love immediately, with others maybe after some time, and again with others maybe never. Turns out the items you never really fall in love with were acquired by you in a somewhat hectic time and way, it is the surroundings that make falling in love with this item so difficult. It is hard to completely avoid these situations, but very conscious and mindful buying will help you minimise the risk.

We want to make your clothes last longer, as by doing so, you would significantly reduce the emissions that are brought up in an item’s life cycle.

Caring for an item contains 5 steps:

First and very important step is to buy quality clothes. Especially natural fibres last longer, and do not need to be washed that often. Maybe you noticed that if you wear a cotton t-shirt on a warm sunny day, it stays fresh for much longer, compared to a polyester t-shirt, where the sweat is captured and the smell intensified. Good quality clothes also mean that seams are done well and the lining is in place. If not, the garments break much sooner, and often chucked away because of holes.

Second step is Washing. It can be so tricky to wash your garment in the right way, as different materials require different types of care. But what we learned when studying how to look after clothes is that washing them too often can cause damage to the fibres. Natural fibres like wool, cashmere, or silk are auto cleaning, and per se require much less washing in the water. Dry cleaning is very harmful to the garments, as toxic chemicals are used and they flatten the natural fibre follicles in many different material types.

Third step for care is Drying. We learned a rule of thumb here: try to avoid using the tumble dryer, as the heat and the spinning damage the fibres as well, and often change the shape of the garment.

Fourth step is ironing. Heat regulation is the most important point here, but trying to steam things instead of ironing is a more gentle way to get rid of creases.

Last step is: Storing. You would not believe it, but hanging everything up on coat hangers, or just folding all your clothes is not the best way of storing. Different types of garments and materials require different storing. But we will get to it!

For now let’s assume you did your best to buy a good quality item, maybe you even found something amazing in our Re-Nou store, and now you are puzzled about how to read the care label instructions. Hang on, all help is under way… Click here for Care Label Instructions.