A wardrobe tells you what somebody believes about clothes. Rails full of everything, or shelves stacked to the ceiling, or some arrangement that grew over years without a decision ever being taken. Most of the time it hardly matters. With knitwear it matters a great deal, because a knitted garment has no fixed dimensions of its own and will slowly become whatever shape you leave it in. A jumper that has hung on a wire hanger for two winters is not the same garment it was, and the change is not something a wash will undo.
What a hanger does to knitted fabric
Knitting is loops. Every stitch is a loop of yarn pulled through the loop below it, and the fabric holds together through friction and tension between those loops rather than through any fixed weave. That is what lets a jumper stretch in every direction and then come back, and it is also what makes it vulnerable, because nothing in the structure sets a permanent size.
A hanger takes the entire mass of the garment and supports it from two narrow points at the shoulders. Everything below is hanging from the stitches at those points, so the load carried by each stitch is highest right there and lowest at the hem. A heavy winter jumper can weigh a kilogram or more, and all of it is being held by a few rows of yarn.
The loops under the most tension elongate first. They pull long and narrow, and yarn feeds gradually out of the neighbouring loops to supply the extra length, so the deformation spreads outwards and downwards from the shoulder. Over a season the shoulder line drops, the upper chest goes baggy and the hem stops hanging level.
The bumps are a separate injury altogether. The end of a hanger is a small hard point pressing outwards against the fabric from the inside, and knitted fabric stretched over a point takes the shape of that point. Wire hangers are the worst offenders, because the ends are narrow and the wire is thin enough to cut into individual loops.
Why the stretch does not come back
Fibres under a constant load do not simply stretch and hold. They creep, which means the molecules inside them slowly slide past one another and settle into new positions while the load is applied. Take the load off after an hour and almost all of it recovers. Take it off after four months and a good deal of it does not.
Wool is the most forgiving fibre here. Its molecules are coiled and held by bonds that reform when the fibre is relaxed and damp, which is why a wool jumper laid flat and dampened will draw a surprising amount of its shape back. It is also why steaming works well on wool and does almost nothing on other fibres.
Cotton has no such spring. Cellulose has very little elastic recovery, so a cotton knit that has hung for a season stays hung. Acrylic sits between the two: it recovers a little with warmth, but repeated heating also relaxes it permanently, so the recovery you get is weaker every time you go looking for it.
This is the part that surprises people. Nothing is broken and nothing looks damaged. The garment is simply a different size now, and because the change happened over months rather than all at once nobody noticed it happening. The comparison only becomes obvious when a newer jumper of the same style is held up beside it.
Necklines and ribbing that go slack
Ribbing works by alternating columns of stitches that face forwards and backwards, so the fabric folds up like a concertina and pulls itself closed. That is a mechanical effect rather than an elastic one, and it depends on the yarn being able to move freely within the loops as the fabric opens and shuts.
Pulling a jumper over the head is the main enemy of it. The neck opening is stretched to its limit and sometimes past it, and the moment it goes beyond the point where the ribbing can fold flat, the yarn itself has to lengthen to make up the difference. Do that repeatedly and the ribbing stops closing.
Undoing a button or a zip fastening first takes most of that load off. Where a garment has no opening at all, easing it over the head rather than dragging it, and taking the weight on the shoulders instead of the neckband, makes a genuine difference across a few hundred wearings.
A slack neckband can often be tightened again. Damp the ribbing, ease it back to the size it ought to be, and dry it flat with something holding it in place. On wool this works well. On a heavily blended yarn with tired elastane in it the result is temporary at best, which is worth knowing before you spend an evening on it.
What actually belongs on a hanger
Woven fabric is the opposite case entirely. Warp and weft cross at right angles and are locked in place by the weave, so the cloth has a fixed size that does not depend on tension. A shirt hung on a hanger for a year comes off the same size it went on, minus a little sag at the shoulder if the hanger was a poor one.
So shirts, blouses, tailored jackets, coats and trousers all belong on a rail, and they are better there than folded, because a crease pressed into a woven cloth is harder to remove than one in a knit. Give jackets and coats a broad shaped hanger, because they carry weight and their shoulders hold a structure a thin hanger will distort.
Trousers hang from the waistband on clips or folded once over a bar. Folded over a bar puts a crease across the leg, which is fine on casual fabric and not at all fine on anything pressed. Clips avoid that and let the leg hang straight, which keeps the line down the front exactly where it was put.
Knitted garments light enough to join them can do so. A fine cotton tee shirt or a thin jersey top weighs so little that the load on each stitch never becomes significant, and hanging keeps it uncreased. The rough test is whether the garment visibly sags when you hold it up by the shoulders and look at the hem.
Folding and shelf storage done well
Fold along the seams where you can, because a seam is already a thickened line and a crease that lands on it is invisible. Bring the sleeves back across the body, fold the sides in and then fold once across the middle, which leaves one horizontal crease in a place nobody ever looks at.
Keep the stacks short. Garments at the bottom of a tall pile are under sustained pressure, which flattens the loft out of wool and presses creases into everything below the top third. Four or five jumpers to a stack is plenty, and two short stacks are better than one tall one even when shelf space is tight.
Move the fold line occasionally. A garment folded the same way for a whole season develops a soft permanent line across it, for much the same reason a hanger develops shoulder bumps. Refolding along a different axis halfway through the year prevents it and takes a couple of minutes for a whole shelf.
Store knitwear clean and store it where air can move. Body oils left in a fibre oxidise over months and turn yellow, and clothes moths are drawn to soiled wool far more than to clean wool. An open shelf or a breathable box beats a sealed plastic tub, which holds moisture against the fibre for as long as it sits there.
Wardrobes in Chandler as it cools
Chandler spends most of the year hot and dry, which makes for easy storage but leaves knitwear hanging untouched in a wardrobe for long stretches. A jumper that has been on the same hanger since March has had six or seven months of continuous load on the same few stitches, and by then the deformation is well past recovering on its own.
Dry air has one advantage worth using. Wool relaxes and reshapes when damp, and in a dry climate a reshaped garment dries quickly and holds its new dimensions, so flat drying after a wash is unusually effective here. The same job somewhere humid takes days and often ends with the garment slumping out of shape again.
As the evenings cool and the run into the holidays brings out the heavier layers, the hanging versus folding question is worth settling garment by garment rather than by habit. Whatever comes off the rail with a bump in each shoulder wants washing, reshaping and a shelf rather than another season hanging where it was.
Washing before it goes on a shelf
Reshaping only works on a garment that has been washed, because a dry fibre will not move and a soiled one will not relax properly. A gentle cool cycle with room to spare in the drum gets a heavy jumper clean without felting it, and a short spin leaves it light enough to lay out flat without stretching.
The machines at our self-service laundry on North Arizona Avenue handle a full season of jumpers in one load, with the space a heavy knit needs to move through the water rather than being packed against the drum wall, which is where a good deal of the damage people blame on washing actually happens.
Our machines and the store are cleaned daily.
Nou wash-dry-fold service covers the everyday laundry.
For general guidance, The American Cleaning Institute publishes a fabric care guide that is a useful cross-check.
The short version
Hanging versus folding is decided by the fabric rather than by the garment. A knitted piece has no fixed size and slowly becomes whatever shape it is left in, and a hanger carries its whole weight on a few shoulder stitches until the fibres creep into that longer shape. Wool recovers some of it when damp, cotton and acrylic much less. Hang woven things and lay knitwear flat on a shelf in short stacks.
WaveMAX Chandler is at 2081 N Arizona Ave 129, easy to reach from Chandler and the surrounding area. If you have a load that will not fit at home, call us at 602-603-5638.