Your Pressing Laundry Questions, Answered

By a handsome laundry expert.

This story is part of Repair Month, a series dedicated to taking better care of the clothes we already own instead of buying more of them. Join the discussion thread, here.

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Repair Month all started with a simple question about laundry. A friend of mine from high school (hi, Jordan) asked me what my routine was, and I realized that for someone who says they care so much about clothes, I’m actually pretty bad at taking care of them. My former roommate Jess can confirm how many times I’ve come back from the laundromat cursing.

Last year, after reporting a harrowing story about The Laundress, I took a cold, hard look at my routine and decided to simplify it. No fragrance. No fuss. No muss. Every scientist I talked to was like: You’re doing too much. (Guys, laundry is science, which also explains why I’m so bad at it.) Now, I read labels and move more slowly and carefully. I put my Pleats Please in a mesh bag with cold water. I use Tide Free & Gentle or Seventh Generation Free & Clear, although, you should know that Seventh Generation is owned by Unilever, which bought The Laundress in 2019. For something fancier, I’ve tried Dirty Labs and it worked fine.

To answer Jordan’s question, I also go to the dry cleaner a lot because I’m lazy and anxious, and my dry cleaner is A Man Who Is Nice to Me. Of course, this is bad for my wallet, and can be bad for the planet, so I’d like to try to find other solutions.

This week, in an effort to better educate myself about laundry, I called up Zachary Pozniak, a fourth-generation dry cleaner (his great-great-grandfather was a tailor who “dabbled in laundry care”), who currently serves as COO at Jeeves, a luxury laundry and dry cleaning business that he and his father own.

He’s big on TikTok. This is him.

He kindly agreed to answer some hyperspecific, reader-submitted questions about laundry and dry cleaning, and some personal ones that I had as well. In general, his advice is: your clothes are not as dirty as you think. We talked about bodily fluids and skin flakes, and how he’s a trained mechanical engineer. I trust him. Below is an abridged version of our conversation.

Let’s start with one of the most commonly asked questions: How do you get rid of armpit stains?