Cashmere, silk, viscose: three classic sorting traps

Losses in dry cleaning concentrate on a small number of fabric families. Three of them recur with striking regularity. Not because they are unusually fragile, but because they are easily confused with more forgiving fabrics.

Cashmere: the felting betrayal

Cashmere is an animal fibre with scales. Under the combined effect of moisture, heat and mechanical movement, those scales interlock irreversibly: this is felting. The garment shrinks, thickens and loses its softness. No treatment reverses it.

The trap: a fine cashmere looks a great deal like merino wool, which is itself more tolerant. On a photograph, as under a quick touch, the distinction is slight.

The reflex: when in doubt between cashmere and wool, treat it as cashmere. Applying a gentle treatment to wool costs nothing; the reverse is permanent.

Silk: watermarks and dye migration

Silk poses two distinct problems, often conflated. The first is the watermark: a spot of water leaves a circular mark, because the fibre swells locally and changes how light reflects. The second is dye migration, especially on brightly printed silks.

The trap: the temptation of local spotting. On silk, dabbing with clear water creates a ring more visible than the original stain.

The reflex: never work locally with water on silk without testing first on an inside seam. And always flag heavily saturated prints: they are the most unstable.

Viscose: the false friend

Viscose is probably the most treacherous fabric in the modern wardrobe. It is a man-made fibre of cellulosic origin: it has the look and drape of silk, and the behaviour of blotting paper in water.

Wet, it loses a large share of its mechanical strength. A simple spin can deform the garment permanently. Shrinkage is common, uneven, and often irreversible.

The trap: it presents itself as silk, a fabric everyone knows to be delicate, or as a fluid cotton, a fabric everyone knows to be tolerant. Depending on which reading wins, the garment is treated correctly — or lost.

The reflex: read the label when it is present and legible. Failing that, creasing behaviour is a useful clue: viscose marks sharply and holds the fold, where silk recovers its shape.

What these three have in common

None of these losses stems from a technical error in the workshop. The treatment applied was correct — for the fabric people believed they were treating. The error always traces back to identification, that is, to the counter.

This suggests a counter-intuitive conclusion: to reduce losses, the most profitable investment is not in the workshop but in the thirty seconds of drop-off. That is where the garment is routed, and therefore where its fate is decided.

It is also why we built Hublo AI around the treatment family rather than the exact composition. Faced with an ambiguous garment, the right answer is not to choose between silk and viscose: it is to recognise the ambiguity and route to the more cautious of the two.