Can I wash a 50 year old Beaded Crepe Dress

[Pook21]

Hi, I don't know if this is the right forum, but here goes: I have a dress that was my mothers, so is approximately 50 years old. It is black crepe (no lining) with beading on the bodice. Can I hand wash it with lux flakes?

No. Don't even think about washing it.

No! That sounds the very definition of something that needs specialist cleaning.

Please don't. It's possible that it would be all right, but it's very likely to shrink.

You can wash plain (non-beaded) thin crepe 1930s dresses. That's how they used to clean them at the time. My mum told me about helping her much older sister to wash her dresses in the Thirties. They would wash them, and the dresses would shrink. Then they would take a section at time (ie, the skirt part, from the waistband to the hem, and then the bodice part, and then the sleeves one at a time) and, each one of them holding one end of the section, pull really hard. They did it until they heard one or two of the stitches break, and that 'crack' was the signal that the section was back to being the right size. When I started buying vintage, I always did this with my plain crepe 30s dresses, and it worked perfectly. Even more oddly, those cracked stitches never started unravelling and needing re-sewing.

I wouldn't do it with a beaded dress, though, and I wouldn't do it with crepe that was anything other than 30s, as I've no idea what would happen.

It's really tricky to find dry cleaners who are good at cleaning vintage clothes. I've had things de-natured (ie, returned to me no longer feeling nice, as if they had been sort of hardened and dried out), and I had one disaster when a dry cleaner shrank a beautiful 1960s wool crepe suit of my mum's. If you love the dress, be careful where you take it, OP. Good luck.

The beads won’t do well.

Thank you all for your prompt responses. I will "interview" professionals.

Be very careful where you take it for cleaning.

Go to people like Jeeves. It will cost ya, but it depends if you can face that. If it were me, vintage washer of ruthlessness, I would put it in a pillowcase and give it a good massage with lux and maybe a splash of disinfectant to get mustiness out.

Thing is, if crepe's going to fall to bits, it will in the dry cleaning anyway. The drying is where you really need to watch it, because the beads will drag on wet, vulnerable fabric. Squeeze it out in a towel and dry flat.

It’s a dress from 1970, not 1870. What is the fabric? Wool? I would put a few inches of tepid water with Woolite in the bath then lay the dress in it. Gently agitate it. It probably just needs freshening but you’ll be able to see if a lot of dirt is coming out. Drain and refill a few times to rinse. At the end leave it lying flat in the bath to let as much water drain as possible. Either contrive somehow to dry it flat or, and this is what I would do, lay I on a big towel and roll it up, squeeze gently to remove as much water as you can, repeat. Then either hang on a hanger or dry flat.

If you have a shower over the bath you could use that to rinse it.

The chances are that its better made than its modern equivalent so may be quite robust. Check if the beads are still firmly sewn on before you start. If they are not; if the thread has perished for example, then they are going to come off however it is cleaned. In that case you can sew them back on, or get someone else to do it (take a picture so you know what they look like).

Does it have a care label of any kind? I think even in the 70's it would say if it needed dry cleaning. I wash lots of things that say dry clean only and have only lost one blouse. Wool especially is very robust if you treat it gently and avoid hot water and vigorous spin cycles.

I would try someone like this: www.emily-may.co.uk/Vintage/index.html