Keeping the stretch alive: washing our knits

Four-way stretch fabric is a machine made of two fibres doing different jobs: one gives softness and structure, the elastane gives the snap-back. Almost everything that ruins stretch pants ruins the elastane specifically, and the two main culprits live in your laundry room.

Heat is the first. Elastane relaxes and eventually breaks down at dryer temperatures, which is how a waistband that held you through a hundred classes turns loose in a season. Our knits dry fast on their own; hang them or lay them flat and they will be wearable by morning. If you must machine-dry, the coolest setting, and accept that you are spending some of the fabric’s life.

Fabric softener is the second. It works by coating fibres, and on a technical knit that coating clogs the surface, holds onto smells and dulls the snap-back. Skip it entirely. A normal detergent, cold or warm water, and turning the pants inside out to protect the outer face is the whole routine.

Wash them with other soft things. Zips, velcro and open hooks in the same drum will pull threads out of a fine knit, and a pulled thread on a stretch fabric does not stay a small problem. A mesh bag is overkill for trousers but not a bad habit for the bras and tanks.

None of this is precious. These are pants built to be worn hard and washed weekly. The point is only that the two-minute version of care, cold wash, no softener, air dry, is also the version that keeps the fabric opaque in a deep squat a year from now.