![]() ![]() I put the wash on overnight, so it uses cheaper electricity.” He says he was motivated “by the climate emergency”. ![]() It is also much kinder to the fabric, so clothes last much longer.” Ken, a retired university lecturer, says: “We used to wash our clothes about six times a week. She took to spraying them with an odour-eliminating mist instead: “They are good as new. Most clothes really only needed a freshen up.” It occurred to me that I didn’t need to wash clothes as often. “The drivers for me were the rising energy costs, the effect on the environment and the inability to dry clothes easily inside. “I stopped washing my clothes as much during winter 2022,” says Jenny, answering a call for readers to share their experiences of reducing their laundry. The climate crisis may finally have persuaded us to consider the environmental impact of hot washes, water usage and carbon-intensive detergents, while recent increases in energy prices have focused the mind on how much each load is costing us. “If I’ve been to a barbecue and there’s a bit of a smoky smell, I might peg them out overnight to air.” It’s prevalent in our society to think of cleanliness in visual terms: does it look clean? Are your whites white? Rosie Cox ![]() It’s better for the environment.” Unwashed jeans don’t smell, he insists. You don’t need to keep spending money on jeans. “Mainly, it gives you a better fade – the jeans age much better, they last longer. “I don’t wash any denim unless there’s a disaster – you spill some milk on your jeans, or something,” says Daniel, a teacher (who washes his pants after every wear). Perhaps, then, the answer is to step away from it altogether – or, at least, do a lot less.ĭenim fans were the first to popularise the no-wash trend for clothes. No amount of expensive detergent brands or Instagrammable laundry rooms will change the fact that washing clothes is still a drudge. Unlike other chores, such as cooking or grocery-shopping, which have either become aspirational or made easier to outsource by tech, “laundry defies the rules of lifestyle innovation and the promises of capitalism”. In the article, the writer Rachel Sugar pointed out that, in the US, apps and services that promise to take care of your washing have largely failed. As Vox put it in 2020, “laundry remains remarkably undisrupted”. The no-wash movement started with hair – water was still in, but shampoo was out – and there are signs laundry could be next. But you just don’t need to wash them as much as people do.” His wife occasionally says he smells, “but she generally doesn’t mind too much”. Photograph: Antonio Guillem/Alamyĭoes he notice his clothes starting to smell? “I do notice – and I change them. Synthetic materials pick up odours more easily than some natural fibres, such as merino wool. “If there’s some important social event, I’ll make sure I’ve got something nice to wear, but day to day it doesn’t really matter.” He looks clean, if fashionably scruffy, when we speak over such a call. “It doesn’t matter.” On video calls, “people only see me from my head up, and half the time I don’t put my camera on anyway”. “Seeing as I don’t have to go to the office any more, I don’t really have a need for clean clothes,” he says. These days, Tim, a software engineer, does a wash every six months or so. “Anything I can cut out of my life I see as a challenge, so laundry was just one less thing to do.” He had already been doing less than many people – a load every week, or sometimes every two – but then he went for an entire year without washing his clothes in the machine. “It was around the time we had our second kid, so I was totally overloaded with things,” he says. This made him consider the time and energy that washing his clothes was costing him. When Tim, like many of us, started working from home during the Covid pandemic, he developed a more relaxed approach to dressing. ![]()
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