How often should you *really* wash items such as knitted sweaters, flannel shirts, etcetera? How often do YOU wash them?
Talking about clothing that usually has another layer beneath and doesn’t have open contact to your pits or junk. I’ve seen people say to wash your wool knits especially only once a season, as wool is supposedly naturally antimicrobial…and hand-washing and then pressing and air drying wools is a labour-intensive faff.
I worry about the “perceived” vs “actual” cleanliness of my garments. If I spot clean them, they look clean, and they smell clean to me, is that…just fine? Maybe I’m too paranoid but I always worry that an overshirt that hasn’t been washed for a while might…I don’t know…smell to other people even if it smells fine to me?
Eventually it hits a logistical turn-point for me, where stuff that’s been worn for a bit ends up washed regardless of if it looks/smells dirty or not. I don’t want to put items that have been worn outside back into my wardrobe to potentially “contaminate” the clean stuff in there (side point: how realistic is this concern?), so things eventually get washed just because I have too many items “on the go” and some need to get processed so that I don’t have like five shirts hanging out around the room.
tl;dr How often do you wash this kind of stuff, and if something looks and smells clean is that enough for you to keep it in rotation? Am I fussing unnecessarily? I used to work around customers who would wear the same knits or outerwear all the time and who stank to high hell, and I guess I’ve grown worried about “being the guy who doesn’t realise that they smell”, but tbf those folks probably also had other stuff going on hygiene-wise beyond only wearing the same stuff a lot.