How to wash and iron a dress shirt

A suit wants to be left alone. A shirt is the opposite: it is worn against the skin, it absorbs everything you do in a day, and it needs washing every single time. That makes the shirt the one garment in a tailored wardrobe where your laundry habits, not your tailor, decide how long it lasts.

Here is the routine, and the reasoning behind each part of it.

Wash cool, and stop crowding the drum

30 to 40°C for cotton shirting. Warm enough to shift body oils, cool enough that you are not cooking the fibres or shrinking the cloth. Hot water is the single fastest way to lose half a size in the collar.

Unbutton the shirt fully, including the collar and cuffs, before it goes in. A buttoned shirt in a machine strains against its own fastenings for an hour.

And give the drum room. An overloaded machine does not agitate, it compresses, so the shirts come out both dirtier and more creased than they went in. Shirts want to move in water.

Use less detergent, especially here

Toronto and most of the GTA drink Lake Ontario water, and it runs moderately hard: the City of Toronto’s own 2024 water analysis puts the average around 120 mg/L, well above the 80 to 100 mg/L Health Canada considers ideal.

Hard water matters for two reasons. Minerals in the water react with detergent and leave a dull, greyish film in the cloth, which is why white shirts in this city go grey at the same rate they go yellow. And the instinctive fix, adding more detergent, makes it worse, because what is left behind is the residue itself.

Use the amount on the cap for a small load, not a large one. If your whites have already gone dull, a wash with no detergent at all, or a dedicated water softener product, will often pull some of that film back out.

Treat the collar and cuffs before the machine sees them

Collar grime is not dirt. It is skin oil and sweat, and it sits in the fold where the collar turns down, which is exactly where a machine’s agitation reaches least.

Before the shirt goes in, put a small amount of liquid detergent straight onto the collar fold and the cuff edges, work it in with a soft brush or your thumb, and leave it a few minutes. This one habit is the difference between a white shirt that stays white for years and one that is visibly tide-marked by spring.

Skip the fabric softener. Skip the chlorine bleach.

Fabric softener works by coating fibres with a thin lubricating film. On towels that feels nice. On a dress shirt it dulls the crispness you paid for, makes the cotton less absorbent, and builds up over time.

Chlorine bleach on a white shirt is a trade you should not take. It whitens for a season, then reacts with the cotton and with any residue left in the cloth, and turns the whites yellow while weakening the fibre. If a white shirt needs lifting, use an oxygen-based whitener and warm water, not chlorine.

Dry it on a hanger, not in the machine

The dryer is where shirts shrink and where collars and plackets set into hard creases that the iron then has to fight.

Take shirts out while wet, give each one a firm snap to shake out the worst of the creasing, and hang it on a shaped hanger to dry. Do up the second button so the shoulders sit correctly. You will find they need perhaps a third of the ironing they used to.

Iron damp, and iron in this order

Cotton presses well when there is moisture in it and resists you when it is bone dry. Iron shirts slightly damp, or keep a spray bottle beside you.

The order exists to stop you creasing what you have already done:

1. Collar. Flat, underside first, from the points inward towards the centre.
2. Cuffs. Also inside first, unbuttoned and flat. Never iron over a button; go around it.
3. Sleeves. Line up the seam, smooth the fabric flat, press from the seam outward. Whether you put a crease in the sleeve is a style choice, and it is easier not to.
4. Yoke. Over the narrow end of the board, one shoulder at a time.
5. Body. Front panel with the placket, then around to the back, then the other front.

Hang it immediately and let it cool on the hanger. A shirt folded or worn while still warm from the iron creases again straight away.

A word on starch

Starch makes a collar look sharp, and it makes a collar die faster. It stiffens the cloth so the fold is sharper, and that sharper fold abrades against itself every time you turn your head. If you like starch, use it lightly and only on the collar and cuffs, and accept the trade you are making.

Hanging and folding

Hang shirts you will wear soon, with space between them, second button done up.

Fold shirts for travel, not for storage. If a shirt lives folded for months, the permanent creases end up exactly where a shirt is most visible, across the chest and down the front. Travel folding is its own craft, covered in packing a suit.

How a shirt actually dies

Not in the body, which is the part everyone checks. A dress shirt fails at three places, in this order:

• The collar fold, which frays along the crease from abrasion. This is the one that makes a shirt unwearable with a jacket.
• The cuff edge, from the desk, the car door and your watch.
• The elbows, which thin before they hole, and only on shirts worn hard.

The body is usually still perfectly good when the collar has gone, which is the frustrating part. A frayed collar or cuff can sometimes be turned or replaced rather than retired. Whether it is worth doing depends on the shirt and on what the rest of the cloth looks like, so bring it in and I will tell you which way it falls.

If the shirt never fitted in the first place

No laundry routine rescues a shirt that pulls at the chest, balloons at the waist or rides up out of your trousers when you reach. That is a pattern problem, and it is worth reading how a dress shirt should fit before you spend another season fighting it. When a shirt is cut to your own measurements, the collar sits where you set it and stays there.

Sources for the water figures: City of Toronto drinking water analysis summaries, via published 2024 hardness data; Health Canada’s guidance on hardness in drinking water.