How often should you dry clean a suit?

The honest answer is: less often than a salesperson will tell you, and more often than most people actually do. Dry cleaning is a solvent process, and every cycle takes a little life out of a garment — but so does leaving body oil, salt, and street grit sitting in wool for six months. The skill is in knowing which risk you are running.

Here is how we think about it at the counter, garment by garment.

Suits and sport coats

A suit you wear once a week needs cleaning roughly every three to four months. A suit you wear three or four days a week needs it every four to six weeks. If you can only remember one rule, use this one: clean a suit after about fifteen to twenty wears, or sooner if it has been somewhere with food, smoke, or a crowded bar.

The trousers will need it before the jacket does — they take the sitting, the subway seat, and the walk through slush — which is exactly why buying a second pair of trousers with a suit is the best money anyone spends on tailoring. If you clean the trousers alone repeatedly, though, the two halves will drift in color. Bring the jacket in with them every second or third time so the suit ages as one thing.

What to do between cleanings

Most of what a suit needs is not cleaning. It is air, a brush, and a night off.

• Hang it on a broad wooden hanger the moment you take it off, and leave it out of the closet overnight. Wool needs a few hours to release the moisture it absorbed from you and to drop its wrinkles on its own.
• Brush it down with a soft clothes brush, top to bottom, once a week. This removes the abrasive grit that grinds fibers apart from the inside and is the single most underrated thing you can do for a jacket.
• Steam it rather than clean it when it is only creased. A garment steamer or ten minutes in a bathroom with a hot shower running will take out most of what makes a suit look tired.
• Give it a rest day between wears. Fibers recover their shape if you let them; they do not if you do not.

Do these four things and you will roughly halve how often the suit needs to see us, which is the opposite of what you would expect a dry cleaner to tell you and nonetheless true.

Overcoats

Once a season, at the end of it. A wool or cashmere overcoat gets cleaned in March or April, not October, for two reasons: the salt and grit of a New York winter are actively corrosive to wool if left in it, and moths lay eggs in soiled wool over the summer specifically because the stains are what the larvae eat. A coat put away dirty is a coat put away with dinner already served.

Dress shirts

Every wear, without exception. This is the one place where people are genuinely too conservative. Cotton is cheap to launder and shirts are washed in water, not solvent, so the process is far gentler than dry cleaning. Meanwhile the collar and cuffs collect body oil that oxidizes into permanent yellowing over a matter of weeks. Nothing wears a shirt out faster than wearing it twice between washes.

Knitwear

Two or three times a season for cashmere and fine wool, plus once more before it goes away for the summer. Sweaters do not touch the ground, they are usually worn over something else, and over-cleaning is a real risk with loosely spun yarns. Between cleanings, deal with pilling using a sweater comb rather than pulling at it, and fold knits rather than hanging them — a hanger will stretch the shoulders of a cashmere sweater permanently within a season.

Ties, scarves, and silk

Only when they need it, and never at home. Silk ties in particular should go to a cleaner rather than being spot-treated, because water on silk leaves a ring of displaced sizing that is more visible than the original mark. If you spill on a tie, blot it, do nothing else, and bring it in.

Dresses and evening wear

After each wearing if there was food, drink, or dancing involved. Perspiration and the invisible sugars in champagne and clear cocktails will not show for months and then will not come out at all. This is the same mechanism that ruins wedding gowns, on a smaller scale — the stain you cannot see is the one that sets.

The stains that ruin clothes are almost never the ones you noticed on the night. They are the ones that were colorless when they landed.

Signs it is time, whatever the schedule says

• The fabric has lost its drape and hangs limply rather than swinging.
• There is a shine on the seat, elbows, or cuffs — that is compacted fiber, and pressing will help.
• You can smell it from arm’s length, or it still smells of last night.
• The collar or the inside of the cuffs has gone grey.
• It is going into storage for the season.

The one thing not to do

Do not store anything dirty. If you take nothing else from this, take that. Every summer we see coats and sweaters come out of closets with moth damage clustered exactly where a spill was, and every one of those garments would have been fine if it had been cleaned in April. The cost of a seasonal clean is a fraction of the cost of the coat.

If you are unsure about a particular piece, bring it in and ask before you commit to a cleaning. We would rather tell you a jacket needs a press and a brush than charge you for a clean it does not need.