The whole label At home
Can I clean or press a wedding dress at home?
Four of the five marks on a care label cover washing, bleaching, drying and ironing, and each one sets its own limit.
General information from the ACCC, the care labelling standard and the Australian War Memorial. It is not advice about your dress.
The label’s own limits, at home
A care label is read in a fixed order, and the four marks before the circle are the ones that apply at home. What each of them permits is set out below in the ACCC’s words: a mark that is not on your dress’s label is not a permission, and a label may add written words beside its marks.
| The mark | What it allows or refuses |
|---|---|
| A tub with a number | Maximum washing temperature shown in Celsius degrees inside the washtub. Normal process. The table gives the same mark a mild and a very mild form, with one bar under the tub for mild and two for very mild. |
| A tub with a hand in it | Wash by hand with a maximum washing temperature of 40°C. |
| A crossed tub | Do not wash. |
The triangle is the second position, and it governs bleach. A plain triangle allows any bleaching agent; a triangle with two oblique lines through it allows only oxygen or non-chlorine bleach, the kind contained in most universal detergents; a crossed triangle refuses bleaching altogether.
| The mark | What it allows or refuses |
|---|---|
| A square with one dot | Tumble drying is possible at a low temperature (exhaust temperature maximum 60°C). |
| A square with two dots | Tumble drying is possible at a normal temperature (exhaust temperature maximum 80°C). |
| A crossed square | Do not tumble dry. |
| A square with a line | Flat drying, and with a drip line above it, drip flat drying. |
| A square with a vertical line | Line drying, and with the drip line above it, drip line drying. |
| Any of those with a corner stroke | The table gives each of the four in the shade as well: flat drying in the shade, drip flat drying in the shade, line drying in the shade, and drip line drying in the shade. |
The square carries more variants than any other position, and the differences between them are the ones a reader is most likely to blur. Flat drying, line drying and their drip forms are separate marks with separate drawings, and the shade variants are separate again: flat drying in the shade is its own mark, not a note added to flat drying. Each is the table’s own row, and each says one thing.
| The mark | The plate temperature it sets |
|---|---|
| One dot | Suitable to iron at low temperatures (maximum plate temperature of 110°C). |
| Two dots | Suitable to iron at moderate temperatures (maximum plate temperature of 150°C). |
| Three dots | Suitable to iron at hot temperatures (maximum plate temperature of 200°C). |
| A crossed iron | Do not iron. Irreversible changes should be expected if an iron is used. |
The iron read as a ladder
Ironing is the position that is easiest to read as a single instruction and hardest to get right, because the mark is a temperature and a household iron is a dial. Set the four iron marks in a row and they read as a ladder: 110 degrees at the plate for the lowest, 150 for the moderate mark, 200 for the hot one, and then the crossed iron, which is not a lower rung but a refusal, with the standard’s own warning attached to it: irreversible changes should be expected if an iron is used.
The ladder is worth reading beside a wedding dress rather than in the abstract, because the standard asks a supplier to write the instruction for the whole article. A dress with beading, lace or a lined bodice is not one material with one safe temperature: the label’s instruction accounts for the trims, linings and embroidery as well, since the care instructions must take into account all elements of the article, and they must be instructions that, followed, do not cause damage. The ladder, then, is the label’s summary of all of that, not a scale the reader applies material by material.
The washtub carries a number for the same reason. A tub reading 40 is a maximum temperature rather than a target, and where the label says wash by hand with a maximum washing temperature of 40°C it is naming the process as well as the heat. A dress whose label carries a crossed tub has had home washing refused in the plainest mark the table has.
What a museum does with the same question
There is a second practice worth knowing about, so long as it is read as what it is. The Australian War Memorial, writing about the care of textiles in its own collection, takes the most cautious line a public institution can take: its conservation advice is that only a trained textile conservator should clean a fragile textile, and that the same applies to washing, dry cleaning and spot cleaning.
That is a museum’s practice on museum objects, and it is quoted here as such. A dress on a rack in a spare room is not an accession, and the Memorial’s line is not a rule the law sets for a household: it is the standard a conservator working on a fragile historic textile holds to, and the reason the Memorial gives is contained in the same page, which describes old textiles as vulnerable and easily damaged. The line where a household’s question ends and a conservator’s begins is a real line, but it is the Memorial’s, not this page’s.
Between the two extremes sit the label’s own marks. A dress whose label allows hand washing at 40°C has been given a household permission, in the standard’s grammar; a dress whose label carries a crossed tub, or whose fabric is older than the marks themselves, has been given something else. What the label cannot tell you is anything about your particular dress beyond its marks, and no page can read a fabric it has never seen. What it can do is put the marks in one place, in the table’s own order, which is what the drawing at the head of this page does.