How to Do Your Laundry

I recently checked in with my good friend Bianca Moreno, the owner of A Little Wicked, a boutique vintage store in New York City's Lower East Side, about her tips on how to do laundry. As the owner of A Little Wicked, Bianca is frequently on the hunt for vintage clothes at her top-secret shopping locations around the country. She has developed a second sense for knowing what clothes can be saved with a good cleaning and which ones have no hope. Between her cross country shopping trips to top secret sourcing locations and her own massive—and envious—closet, Bianca estimates she does about 20 to 30 loads of laundry a month!

“My love for laundry stems from my love of clothes and it's important to preserve their life as long as possible!” Bianca says.

Here are her laundry tips for getting and keeping your clothes looking their very best:

• I almost always wash my clothes in cold water. Hot water and the heating process does a number on your clothes. My only exceptions are warm for towels, bed linens and household necessities and hot on white whites.
• Always use a lingerie bag for your bras and panties and set the washing machine on the delicate cycle. Otherwise the machine can be too rough on them and destroy these pieces.
• If a piece of clothing is stained, let it soak in a bowl with a stain remover for a few hours or overnight and then wash the item as you would regularly.
• Always separate your whites from your colors. Be extra careful with anything that is red—red is the clincher. One random red sock can bleed all over your lighter colors and ruin them. It is safe to wash red with like colors (orange or purple) or dark denim.
• Invest in a drying rack for your bra and panties and anything you don’t want to shrink. Dryers are bad all around for your cute and fitted clothes, especially in the city where the communal dryers tend to run really hot. The hot temperature can also fade your clothes.
• I do put jersey and knits that tend to stretch out on the low setting in the dryer for a short amount of time (15 to 20 minutes). The heat helps them shrink back to size and feel all yummy and soft.
• Use a laundry detergent in a packet like Tide Pods. They don’t take up too much space in your closet and they’re easy to carry down to your laundry room or over to the Laundromat. Plus they’re neat. No drips! With Tide Pods you simply toss them in the washer before your dirty clothes—no fuss, no muss! They work with all water temperatures and can be use in a front load washer or a traditional one. Be sure to store them on a high shelf, away from the reach of children or pets.

Here are some additional fun facts you might not have known about laundry:

• 40 percent of Americans wash in cold water.
• 20 percent of people rewash loads because they are not clean the first time, wasting time, energy, water and money.
• 22 percent of laundry rooms are in their basement while many other people use Laundromats requiring them to carry a bottle that can weigh up to 7 pounds in addition to the average 7 pounds load of laundry.
• There are over 900 laundry conditions that a person can face.