[Lifestyle] The no-wash movement: would you wear underpants for a week without cleaning them?

[BirSaNN]

When Tim, like many of us, started working from home during the Covid pandemic, he developed a more relaxed approach to dressing. This made him consider the time and energy that washing his clothes was costing him. “It was around the time we had our second kid, so I was totally overloaded with things,” he says. “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.

These days, Tim, a software engineer, does a wash every six months or so. “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. “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”. He looks clean, if fashionably scruffy, when we speak over such a call. “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 still uses the washing machine to clean his children’s clothes (and his wife still does hers), although he has cut down on that, too. “There’s still loads of washing to do – that’s part of the reason I don’t do my clothes.” It helps, he says, that he has quite a lot of clothes, but during the year-long abstention he got about two weeks’ wear out of a single outfit.

Tim cut down on socks by wearing sandals, including for much of the winter. “I never have to wash socks any more, which was always the biggest problem.” Did he at least wear clean underpants every day? “You can get pants to last a week,” he says. How, I ask nervously, do you get a week’s worth of wear out of pants? “You just have very low standards.” Sometimes, he would wear swimming trunks as underwear – he would wear them in the shower, where they would get a wash, then they would dry quickly.

Does he notice his clothes starting to smell? “I do notice – and I change them. 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”.

 

The no-wash movement started with hair – water was still in, but shampoo was out – and there are signs laundry could be next. As Vox put it in 2020, “laundry remains remarkably undisrupted”. 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. 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”. No amount of expensive detergent brands or Instagrammable laundry rooms will change the fact that washing clothes is still a drudge.

Perhaps, then, the answer is to step away from it altogether – or, at least, do a lot less.

Denim fans were the first to popularise the no-wash trend for clothes. “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). “Mainly, it gives you a better fade – the jeans age much better, they last longer. You don’t need to keep spending money on jeans. It’s better for the environment.” Unwashed jeans don’t smell, he insists. “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

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.

“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 drivers for me were the rising energy costs, the effect on the environment and the inability to dry clothes easily inside. It occurred to me that I didn’t need to wash clothes as often. Most clothes really only needed a freshen up.”

She took to spraying them with an odour-eliminating mist instead: “They are good as new. 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. Now, we do it just once a week. We use soap nuts [a type of small fruit that contains soap] and wash at 30C. I put the wash on overnight, so it uses cheaper electricity.” He says he was motivated “by the climate emergency”.

When it comes to what we wear, trying to choose more environmentally conscious clothing is increasingly mainstream – many of us buy less, or secondhand, or supposedly “ethical” brands. But that is only the start, says Charlotte, who works in sustainability and fashion. “Post-purchase washing has a really big impact. Cold washing, only washing when you need to, wearing things for longer – these are of equal, if not greater, importance from a consumer decision-making point of view than buying a ‘sustainable’ brand or more sustainable fibre.”

link: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/jun/20/the-no-wash-movement-would-you-wear-underpants-for-a-week-without-cleaning-them